Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet**
Lyon National Opera Ballet & Lyon National Opera Orchestra / Kent Nagano
Arthaus DVD 100 246
This isn’t your grandmother’s Romeo and Juliet—thank God for that.
Angelin Preljocaj’s Lyon production strips Prokofiev’s ballet down to something raw and necessary, cutting the score to less than half its usual bloat. Purists will howl. Let them. What emerges here is a vision so uncompromising, so viscerally urgent, that the standard-issue productions—with their tasteful Renaissance costumes and polite choreographic genuflections—suddenly look embalmed.
Kent Nagano conducts as if the opera house were on fire. The Lyon orchestra responds with playing that crackles and spits, the brass snarling through the “Dance of the Knights” with genuine menace rather than the usual ceremonial pomp. Tempi are taut, sometimes breathlessly so. Where the Nureyev version on Warner drowns in its own solemnity (treacle, as my colleague aptly noted), Nagano finds the score’s inherent violence, its modernist bite. This is Prokofiev as he should sound—acerbic, unsentimental, dangerous.
The production itself will alienate anyone seeking pretty. Enki Bilal’s designs evoke a bombed-out Eastern European cityscape, all concrete walls and fascist architecture. The aesthetic borrows heavily from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but filtered through the lens of ethnic cleansing and urban warfare. Helicopter sounds intrude. The Montagues and Capulets aren’t feuding nobles—they’re street gangs, thugs in a police state. The nurses attending Juliet move like automatons, their gestures mechanical and chilling.
Preljocaj’s choreography operates in stark contrasts. Romeo and Juliet (Pascale Doye and Nicolas Dufloux, both luminous) move with liquid freedom—their pas de deux genuinely erotic, tender, alive. Everyone else inhabits a different physical vocabulary: the guards march in angular, minimalist patterns; the crowd scenes pulse with an almost robotic precision. The “Dance of the Knights” finally becomes what it should be—aggressive, militaristic, genuinely threatening rather than a decorative chess game.
The editing of the score proves more defensible than it sounds. Yes, scenes get shuffled—“Romeo decides to avenge Mercutio’s death” appears before “Mercutio Dies,” which makes no narrative sense but creates a kind of temporal dislocation that suits the production’s nightmare logic. The booklet’s track listings are wrong in places (No. 31 misidentified), but these are minor irritations.
One major miscalculation: Juliet’s death occurs after the music ends. It’s a baffling choice that drains the moment of its proper tragic weight. Prokofiev’s final pages deserve better.
But this remains the most compelling Romeo and Juliet currently available on DVD. It won’t comfort you. It probably shouldn’t. Nagano’s incendiary conducting and Preljocaj’s unsparing vision create something rare—a production that actually feels contemporary, that speaks to our moment rather than genuflecting before tradition. The playing is superb, the dancing committed, the conception bold.
Essential viewing, warts and all.
