Swan Lake

It is an astonishing twenty three years since Matthew Bourne first turned the world of ballet on its head with his game-changing Swan Lake. It’s a production best known for the gender swap of the eponymous lead character, but that is actually the least of it. The central dance of the Swan and his bevy is a set piece that is one of the few recognisable features of this production. More significantly, Bourne rewrote the story, rearranged the score, and refocused on a different character. Returning to Norwich for the most recent of several revivals, it proved to be as stunning and breath taking as ever, confounding the prejudices of anyone (not least me) who thinks ballet simply isn’t for them.
 
I quickly gave up trying to count the huge and universally excellent cast, each of them opulently dressed in Les Brotherstone’s costumes, as they busied themselves with mime as much as dance, in and around his stunning sets. The hapless Prince (barely recovered from a nightmare that gave us just a teasing glimpse of the Swan) performs his princely duties in the wake of his icily efficient mother. Dominic North made an immediate impression as the man-child thrust into a role for which is barely equipped, to the extent that one could almost sympathise with Nicole Kabera’s Queen, weary of a son that so clearly disappoints. There is whimsy aplenty going on (no review would be complete without a mention of the corgi on wheels) before Freya Field steps up with her considerable comic skills. Funny dance sounds oxymoronic, but she was excellent at moving in a way that suggested clumsy gaucheness, despite obviously being a fine dancer. As a girlfriend that is not good enough for mother, she set off a narrative momentum compelling enough that you almost forgot to watch the dancing.
 
It’s a narrative that includes a family outing to the ballet – a show within a show – that audaciously allows us to watch them watching someone else dance. Competently done, it was dance that was nonetheless overwrought and mannered and was obviously Bourne’s commentary on the classical form. As our lead characters stifle yawns and fiddle with their phones the faux ballet dancers crane their necks begging for applause. This, he is saying, is everything that’s wrong with dance, so I’m going to laugh at it with you, and then we are going to cast it aside. Tellingly the scene that followed was a thumping, frenetic nightclub in which dance was as much interpretive as ballet, and with the story of the Prince’s precipitous fall from grace at the forefront.
 
All of which leads up to the great centrepiece, as handsomely staged as everything that has gone before, that finally feeds our hunger to see some swan action. When this production ran at Sadler’s Wells it featured the Royal Ballet wunderkind Matthew Ball as the Swan, and I did wonder whether, out in the sticks, we might feel short changed with someone else in the lead. On the contrary, from the moment Will Bozier made his first appearance it was obvious he was intent on owning both the role and the stage. Enough has been said about the novelty of a man playing the Swan, but it’s important to emphasise that there was nothing camp or parodic in this interpretation. On the contrary, it makes perfect sense that a beast that can supposedly break your arm with a flap of its wing, would be played by a giant of a man. Bozier is a fearsome and intimidating presence on stage, scratching and hissing as countless other swans joined him on stage, each barefooted and chested, and all wearing those signatures feathered pantaloons. Superbly choreographed and perfectly executed, this was dance at its most sublime. Impossibly athletic and clearly physically demanding, the production had finally dispensed with storytelling, replacing it with a spectacle that was nonetheless touching as the silly, gauche Prince fell under the spell of this supernatural being.
So how on earth do you follow that - after the unbridled abstraction of swans dancing en masse, it was certainly challenging returning to a narrative arc. Now playing The Stranger, Will Bozier was every bit as good with his leather trousers and his E cigarettes, but the requirements of storytelling did bring us down with a bump. There was some brilliant dancing from the ensemble to enjoy, and North did a good job of going steadily bonkers in the face of unrequited love, but it was only when we returned to his nightmares that production went back onto full throttle. Whether the Swan was a dream, a symbol of repressed sexuality or… just a swan, I cannot say, and Bourne has wisely kept explicit meaning diffuse. Neither do I pretend to fully understand the symbolism – if that is what it was – of the Swan returning injured, fighting with his fellows to protect the Prince. I do think it likely Bourne intended something more universal than the homoerotic parable he has been credited with. In the final, heart breaking moments, we witnessed not only outstanding drama conveyed through wordless movement, but a commentary on the universal tragedy of lost love that transcended something as feeble as the gender of the protagonists.