It's not often that you hear booing at the ballet, but booing there unmistakeably was as the director, Declan Donnellan, and the choreographer, Radu Poklitaru, of the Bolshoi's new Romeo and Juliet took to the stage after the London premiere.
Shakespeare's play has inspired two flagship Bolshoi productions, Leonid Lavrovsky's in 1940 and Yuri Grigorovich's in 1979, so there was considerable expectation riding on this one. A lack of directorial and choreographic inventiveness, however, allowed the piece to sink like a stone.
In order to highlight the hostility of the other characters towards the lovers (Denis Savin and Maria Alexandrova) Donnellan has the corps de ballet on stage for almost all of the 90 minutes of the action, and the massed ranks of the Montagues and Capulets repeatedly act as physical barriers to the lovers' union. That love can be thwarted by the expectations of family and society is worth stating once, but it is too obvious a concept to bear constant repetition.
Of the protagonists, only Alexandrova's disco-bunny Juliet is able to build any kind of character, forcing life into Poklitaru's inert choreography by her sheer force of will. Savin's Romeo does his best, but comes across as if he were Gareth from The Office, and he is unconvincingly roused to a frenzy of stabbing when Denis Medvedev's spivvy Tybalt murders Yuri Klevtsov's cross-dressing Mercutio.
There is no attempt at leitmotif , nor any attempt at expressing individual personality through dance. All of the steps are drawn willy-nilly from the same modernistic grab-bag, and include borrowings reminiscent of, among other sources, Jerome Robbins's dances for West Side Story and the ballets of Mats Ek.
That the production ever saw the light of day suggests a troubling lack of discrimination on the part of Alexei Ratmansky, the Bolshoi's new director. His dancers clearly saw the way the wind was blowing - of the 13 principals on this tour, only Alexandrova has had anything to do with it. The single star rating above this review is hers. For valour.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
