Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet – Cuthbertson

Kenneth MacMillan understood something that eluded a good many choreographers who came before him: Prokofiev’s score is not really about swordplay and balconies at all. It’s about weight. The weight of a body falling into another body, the weight of adolescent feeling that has nowhere yet to go, the weight of those trombones in the “Dance of the Knights” that stomp through the Capulet ballroom like fate itself wearing brocade. Get a Juliet who can’t summon that gravity, who dances the role as if it were an assignment rather than a discovery, and the whole edifice turns to décor.

Lauren Cuthbertson does not make that mistake. This is a reading built from the inside. Her first entrance, all coltish energy and unfilled promise, has the loose-jointed carelessness of a girl who has not yet learned to be looked at. There’s a moment, small and unforced, where she nearly trips over her own eagerness chasing after the Nurse. It tells you more about who this Juliet is than any amount of mime. By the time we reach the bedroom pas de deux in act three, that same body has become something else: weighted, wary, adult in its sorrow. Cuthbertson doesn’t perform the transformation. She simply is not the same dancer she was two hours earlier, and that is the highest compliment I can pay a ballerina in this role.

Federico Bonelli partners her with the kind of unfussy elegance that used to be called, without embarrassment, “danseur noble” quality, though there’s nothing aristocratic about his Romeo in temperament. He’s puppyish with Mercutio and Benvolio in the opening scenes, all swagger and borrowed bravado, the sort of young man who postures because he hasn’t yet been given a reason not to. Shakespeare gives him that reason in a garden at midnight; Prokofiev gives it to him in strings that rise out of nowhere, unaccompanied, achingly exposed. Bonelli rises with them. His line is long, his landings are like breath being let out slowly. He doesn’t have Nureyev’s dangerous electricity, but he has something Nureyev rarely bothered with: tenderness that reads as genuine.

The 1965 original cast was an accident of politics as much as art. Fonteyn and Nureyev were imposed on MacMillan by a management desperate to keep its biggest stars in its biggest new ballet, displacing Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, who had actually originated the choreography in the studio and were considerably closer to Shakespeare’s ages. Fonteyn was 45. Whatever alchemy she and Nureyev produced on opening night was achieved despite the text, not because of it. Cuthbertson and Bonelli, working nearly half a century later, get to do what Seymour and Gable were originally meant to do: dance youth as youth, without needing to transcend the arithmetic of the birth certificate.

Prokofiev’s score survived worse indignities than casting disputes. The Bolshoi initially rejected it as undanceable, too symphonic, too continuous, lacking the discrete “numbers” a corps de ballet expected to count against. He reworked it, softened the ending from tragedy to reconciliation and back again more than once under pressure, and didn’t see a full Soviet staging until 1940, in Leningrad, with Galina Ulanova. The tragic ending we now take as inevitable was itself a fight. Listening to this Royal Ballet Sinfonia reading under the pit, brisk in the market scenes, unhurried and dark-hued in the death music, you hear a score that has absorbed its own turbulent history. The mandolin dance has real snap. The Friar Laurence music breathes with proper ecclesiastical gravity, low woodwinds like held incense.

Visually the production shows its age gracefully rather than youthfully. Nicholas Georgiadis’s sets and costumes, now pushing sixty years old themselves, favor sumptuous Renaissance clutter over any updated concept, and I confess I prefer it that way. This Romeo and Juliet trusts its choreography and its music to do the emotional work, without a director’s imposed concept muscling in to explain what MacMillan already made plain in movement.

Is it the finest Romeo and Juliet on video? Ulanova’s filmed performances carry a historical weight nothing can replicate, and the Bolshoi’s Grigorovich staging has a sweep and scale this more intimate MacMillan version doesn’t attempt. But as a modern document of the ballet Covent Garden made its own, four hundred performances and counting, this one belongs near the top of the shelf. Cuthbertson’s Juliet, in particular, is a performance I suspect I’ll be measuring others against for years.