6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
'Radical' - Review: Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Decades on, and Bourne's globally-celebrated Swan Lake continues to surprise and delight visually-striking male swans, bare-torso'd in their white, frondy britches, have a lithe synchronicity that melds grace and muscularity with an edge of feral menace - no wonder the vulnerable misfit Prince (Leonardo McCorkindale) is as entranced as we are when the Swan (Jackson Fisch) comes unexpectedly close to him… Their ensuing duets resonate with a burgeoning trust and tenderness that is markedly absent from the Prince's life at court.
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Bourne's knack for nuanced story-telling ensures we swiftly grasp the hidden desires, self-interest, insidious manipulation and callous indifference that prevail there - Katrina Lyndon's Queen is a prime example of this, uncaringly cold towards her son, openly hot towards any man who takes her fancy. Some tongue-in-cheek details are, perhaps, no longer timely but they nonetheless conjure up a persuasive context for what tragically unfolds.
Bourne has tagged this 30th Anniversary tour as 'The Next Generation' - many of those on-stage weren't even born when Swan Lake was devised! From first to last, they do him proud, keeping meticulous faith with his intentions and his choreographic invention. Lez Brotherston's designs remain wonderfully sympathetic to Bourne's creative impulses: the swan costumes are now iconic.
Thirty years on, and this Swan Lake not only seizes the audience's imagination - it captures their hearts as well.
