11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Review: Matthew Bourne's swans are still flying high
Thanks to its brilliantly bold re-envisioning of the piece – complete with a bevy of glorious and dynamic male swans – the choreography has, deservedly, achieved the status of a classic of modern ballet.
The basis of the show's extraordinary success is that it is a ballet constructed from the ground upwards. Of course it keeps Tchaikovsky's magnificent score – and it maintains structural elements of the famous 1895 choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov – but Bourne's choreography is a work of startling originality.
From the moment that The Prince is visited in his dreams by a beautiful male swan, we know that we are encountering what was, in 1995, a distinctively new version of the ballet. As in Tchaikovsky's original, The Prince is condemned by his officious mother to select a bride at the forthcoming royal ball.
However, in Bourne's choreography, the protagonist's aversion to these arranged nuptials is connected boldly and humorously to the ballet's homo-erotic dimension. In an early scene, for instance, the Prince is observably captivated by an exquisite male nude sculpture (which is represented, back to the audience, by a real-life performer standing on a wheeled dolly).
The show sparks constantly with such imaginative innovations, which are assisted always by stunning set and costume designs by Lez Brotherston. One dare not take one's eyes off the show for a moment, lest one miss some delightful detail.
The Prince (played with an appropriate sense of distractedness on opening night in Edinburgh by Leonardo McCorkindale) finds himself saddled with the dreadful Sloane known only as The Girlfriend. She, in turn, was danced with marvellous hyper-activity and vulgarity in Edinburgh by Bryony Wood.
Brotherston's design work comes into its own when the action shifts to a disreputable nightclub up a backstreet in the Soho district of London. Here, the clubbers come and go in a dazzling array of costumes, while video designer Duncan McLean's projection of a huge, painted advert for Swan Vestas safety matches takes glorious flight.
READ MORE: Kathleen MacInnes captures magic of Tradfest in live album recording
The great, pioneering German choreographer Pina Bausch famously relegated the significance of traditional pointe ballet shoes. Bourne dispenses with them entirely.
Nonetheless, there is a sense in which – in its impressive solo dances, pas de deux and ensemble dances – Bourne's choreography bridges the space between traditional ballet and contemporary dance. Like much great art, this Swan Lake is simultaneously robust and poetic.
The ballroom scene towards the end of the ballet is a case in point. The character of The Stranger (danced in Edinburgh with an undeniable, testosterone-fuelled swagger by a leather-clad Rory Macleod) rolls together the characters of the sorcerer Rothbart and his daughter Odile.
Here – as The Stranger seduces everyone in the room, including both The Prince and his mother, The Queen – the universal eroticism of Bourne's choreography charts a direct course into the tragic heart of Tchaikovsky's ballet.
At His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, May 28-31; and Theatre Royal, Glasgow, June 3-7:
