Last weekend I ventured over the border - yes! - to Plymouth for the night to see Matthew Bourne's new ballet of Romeo and Juliet. As ever with MB, expect the unexpected, which not everyone likes. (This is the man who brought us the male Swan Lake, among many other different takes on classic stories.)
So of course R&J was going to be different. Av and I loved it - the sets are always excellent, but this was very stark and black and white which underlined the severity of the unusual setting - a psychiatric unit. The inmates wore white, the jailor (or equivalent) wore black, had tattoos and was very fond of the bottle. The dancing was amazing and the young lovers' passion was wonderful. And the music was all live, played with a 15 piece orchestra in the pit, as opposed to a 40 or 50 piece orchestra - and still sounded amazing.
As for the ending - well, as with most of Shakespeare, don't expect a rose tinted happy ending. In the original, I believe, Juliet takes enough poison to send her to sleep, Romeo finds her, believes she's dead and polishes off the rest of the poison. Juliet awakes, finds him dead and stabs herself.
In MB's version it's slightly different (no spoilers) and when I posted on Facebook, someone said they thought it was a shame about the use of knives, given the current stabbings.
So, what do you think? Would you tamper with the ending of a Shakespeare play and remove the stabbing? Would that really make a difference to the kind of people who tend to go and see ballet anyway? I would be very interested to know...
And lastly, this was seen on the fence near to our B&B. Looks like someone had a really good night out....
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