Rudolf Nureyev may have famously danced the first performance of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet in 1966, but when he choreographed his own version a decade later he did everything he could to re-write that classic. As English National Ballet's revival shows, this is a ballet where Romeo unusually takes centre stage. From his first brazenly strutting solo to his last, egregiously muscular dance of grief, it's clear that the real love affair here is between the choreographer and his hero.
But Nureyev also had his own ideas about the rest of the story - fast-forwarding the plot in big, bold snapshots that were the opposite of MacMillan's leisurely naturalism. Some of these come splashed with gothic symbolism, the lovers stalked by Death figures and skulls. But some are packed with dramatic detail as Nureyev - determined to clarify every minor plot line - added new scenes and characters, and re-jigged the action.
Parts of the ballet are a real improvement - especially the grisly tragicomedy of Mercutio's death. Yet, while Nureyev's version scores on pace and clarity it flounders in the emotional climaxes. Rarely could he find dance images potent enough to strike the major chords (the lovers' first eye contact, the Capulets' discovery of Juliet's body), and because Nureyev was largely deaf to the dramatic promptings in Prokofiev's score he often produced a weirdly distancing slippage between dance and music. But the real problem was his desperation to cram the ballet with steps - creating choreography that was often dramatically inappropriate, stylistically clashing and needlessly brutal to dance.
All this makes the ballet an unforgiving work for its cast and, despite the steel wire resilience of Daria Klimentova's Juliet and the undaunted stamina of Dmitri Gruzdyev's Romeo, many of the young, inexperienced dancers struggle to make the ballet live. The real tragedy on stage is, in fact, that of the company. Forced by funding cuts into touring a repertory of desperate meagreness there is no way it can currently give its dancers the kind of professional nurture and challenge that their short careers require.
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