Siobhan Murphy

NB: This review is from a 2018 production of ‘Swan Lake’ This latest outing for Matthew Bourne’s most famous (and best) work is billed as a revamped version, but the changes won’t ruffle anyone’s feathers – a new lighting design, costumes and some choreographic tweaks. His ‘Swan Lake’ is essentially what it always was: a subversive reboot of ballet’s best loved story, in which our Prince is a tormented young man, starved of affection by his ice-queen mother, who, at his lowest ebb, seems to find the love he craves – from a male swan. For the London run, Bourne has scored a coup: the young Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball plays the Swan. Muscular torso on display, Ball’s gorgeous technique and RPatz-like romantic melancholy keep your eyes fixed on him. On opening night he seemed tentative, but the real disappointment is that he hasn’t yet worked out how to channel his inner bad boy, which means his Act III turn, as the seductive, destructive, leather-trousered Stranger who crashes the Queen’s ball, falls flat, and his chemistry with Liam Mower’s Prince misfires. Hopefully he’ll learn to let go. Meanwhile, there’s lots to love about this production. Mower is on fine form as the Prince – his tragic trajectory is sharply etched and affecting. Nicole Kabera as the Queen manages to combine a regal bearing with cougar rapacity. Katrina Lyndon’s Girlfriend is a magnificently blowsy creation. Bourne’s jocular visual asides and set pieces, and his affectionate ribbing of classical b

This review is from February 2020.  The last time hip hop and the music of Sting coincided in any significant manner was when P Diddy turned ‘Every Breath You Take’ into ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, a paean to his late pal Biggie Smalls. They’re not an obvious fit – although a surprising number of artists have sampled the work of Gordon Sumner, from 2Pac to The Weeknd. It turns out that Kate Prince, the powerhouse behind the ZooNation hip hop dance troupe, has been a lifelong fan of Sting and The Police. ‘Message in a Bottle’, two years in the making, is therefore something of a passion project, stuffed to the gills with his hits from across the decades, in new arrangements courtesy of Alex Lacamoire, of ‘Hamilton’ fame, who has punched up the beats to add hip hop bounce. Sting’s earnest socio-political leanings in his solo work, and his love of world music influences, lend themselves to a tale of the refugee crisis – but the fact that the storyline came after the idea of using his music is apparent. There’s a by-numbers feel to how a family is torn apart by civil war and flees to another country, and very little in the way of emotional connection as we are bustled along to the next scene, next song. Improbabilities pile up, and the ending is preposterously saccharine. Where’s the anger? Prince doesn’t call on the darker side of hip hop dance, but sticks to showcasing the robust b-boy skills of her company, mixed with punchy contemporary moves. It’s the dancers you should see the s

This review is from August 2019, Matthew Bourne’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ returns in August 2023. After ‘Swan Lake’, ‘The Nutcracker’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Cinderella’, another of ballet’s big beasts has received the Matthew Bourne treatment. The choreographer has shaken up Shakespeare’s tragedy and Prokofiev’s mighty score to come up with one of his most appealing works.It wouldn’t be Bourne without a radical revamp, so Romeo meets Juliet in a brutal ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’-style psychiatric hospital-cum-borstal, evoked with beautiful simplicity by Lez Brotherston’s set of cold white tiles and ringing metal staircases. Romeo (Paris Fitzpatrick) is dumped there by his politician parents, who don’t have time to care about him; Juliet (Cordelia Braithwaite) is trying and failing to escape the clutches of the predatory prison guard Tybalt (an intimidating Dan Wright).Erasing the family-feud element leaves us with a tale of youth against authority – which could seem trite but works because of the explosive energy Bourne’s young cast brings to the stage. Around a core of company members, Bourne has brought in dozens of newly minted dancers, some still in training, and they grab this opportunity.Whether stomping out their anger and frustration to the Dance of the Knights, writhing around at the institutional disco, grilling the star-crossed lovers in their separate dorms, ‘Grease’-style, about the night before or massing for Tybalt’s grisly end, they infuse dynamism and int

The choreographer Cathy Marston has a knack for storytelling – her ballets, many based on classic works of literature, share an involving narrative drive. ‘The Cellist’, her first main stage commission for the Royal Ballet, adapts the real-life story – a biodance, if you will – of Jacqueline du Pré, that charts her dizzy rise to classical music superstardom and her descent into multiple sclerosis, which forced her to give up playing at the age of 28. Hildegard Bechtler’s beautifully simple set gives the sense of being inside a cello, with one curved strip of light above the stage resembling the instrument’s F-holes and a curved revolving wooden screen that pushes the scenes along. Bodies represent objects: dancers are cupboards, record players and, most importantly, instruments; at the heart of Marston’s vision of this tale is the love affair between du Pré and her Stradivarius cello. Marcelino Sambé gives the role of The Instrument a tumultuous energy, literally sweeping Lauren Cuthbertson’s du Pré off her feet as she melts into the ecstatic delight of playing, lifted on the swell of Philip Feeney’s classics-referencing score and Hetty Snell’s solo cello. Does Sambé need to mimic an actual cello (on one knee, leaning back between Cuthbertson’s legs, with one arm raised) quite so often? Maybe not – but they build a convincing relationship. And when du Pré meets and marries the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim (Matthew Ball, all in black and seething with a dominating ch

You’re handed earplugs as you enter the Linbury for ‘Aisha and Abhaya’, a new work from Rambert that benefits from the state-of-the-art production that the Royal Opera House’s second stage can offer. Exciting, eh? Sadly, the promise of sonic fireworks remains unfulfilled, much like the promise of the whole venture. Director Kibwe Tavares is a filmmaker who hadn’t previously created a live performance, and by his own admission knew next to nothing about contemporary dance before being commissioned by Rambert. So a good half of this hour-long production is a lavishly directed film, in which two sisters – Salomé Pressac and Maëva Berthelot, dressed in fantasy-Armenian-bride extravagance by Uldus Bakhtiozina – are washed up on a foreign shore, having escaped a war in their country, and stumble across a fireside bacchanal in the woods. Without being told that the genesis for this story was Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl’, you would be hard-pressed to guess. This is interspersed with sections of dance created by the Israeli choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, to the techno/trance music of their regular collaborators Ori Lichtik and Gaika. Seven dancers, including a luminous Berthelot, perform Eyal’s club-inspired, muscular contemporary moves – pulsing, thrusting and undulating to an insistent beat, often in synch, with blank faces, slow-motion movement, catwalk struts, raised arms and jabbing elbows, and a punishing amount of time on tiptoes. Flashy visuals

As a sweet treat for Christmas, and a change from its usual ‘Nutcracker’ production, the Royal Ballet has revived ‘Coppélia’, last seen on the Covent Garden stage 13 years ago. It’s a delightfully silly piece, albeit with a dark undertone befitting the tale’s ETA Hoffmann origins, with an instantly recognisable Delibes score, a fantastic character role in Dr Coppélius and a spirited heroine who brooks no nonsense from anyone. Swanilda understandably takes a dim view of her fiancé Franz flirting with the young woman who has appeared at Dr Coppélius’s window. She sneaks into the crotchety inventor’s house with her friends to confront her rival – only to discover that Coppélia is just one of a roomful of automata that the lonely eccentric has created for himself. An elaborate trick is then played on Coppélius, who believes he has managed to use magic to imbue life into his doll (it’s Swanilda dressed as Coppélia). But all’s well by the end, and much sparkly dancing ensues. Francesca Hayward has great fun as Swanilda, an inquisitive, assertive heroine who adds a cheeky twist to romanticism’s tropes. She’s light as a feather as she sails around the stage, delightfully convincing in her jerky doll movements, full of sass when she’s scolding Franz, or duping Coppélius, and finely detailed in her technique. Alexander Campbell does a good job of making Franz likeable (despite his character’s shocking readiness to dally with another woman); he’s a tender partner to Hayward and manages

There’s some debate among the current crop of BalletBoyz about what they have created with ‘Them’, the 30-minute piece that opens this double bill – a really nice bolognese, a carbonara, or a pizza with many toppings. So we learn in the tongue-in-cheek short film the BalletBoyz co-creators Michael Nunn and William Trevitt have made to precede it for the all-male company’s West End debut. ‘Them’ is the first time the dancers have made their own work – becoming the chefs, not just the ingredients – and the Boyz show they have learnt a trick or two from the top-flight choreographers they have worked with previously. It’s a devised piece, made in tandem with Charlotte Harding’s string score, that feels loose, born of spontaneity and authentic. Sequences grow out of simple gestures – a handshake, for instance, leads to a string of tag-team duets, then to a coiling line of all six dancers holding hands. The imposing prop of a cube-shaped frame, flipped and turned repeatedly, provides a climbing frame and a space for thoughtful solos. The work has evolved since its premiere at Sadler’s Wells in March – and there’s a crackling, protean energy as the dancers stretch out into their own creation. ‘Us’, the second half of the evening, is a quite different affair. It started as a short duet by Christopher Wheeldon for a previous BalletBoyz show and has now been expanded. The new first half has all six dancers caught up in a regime where an undercurrent of aggression can be felt in their a

Carlos Acosta’s production of ‘Don Quixote’ for the Royal Ballet seemed a somewhat awkward fit when it premiered in 2013. This is a ballet of OTT slapstick humour and exuberant passions, its gossamer-thin storyline merely a vehicle for showstopping party pieces from the principals, and the RB dancers seemed to struggle to find their feet in it. It’s a pleasant surprise, then, to find how well it has bedded in – even without Acosta’s megawatt presence on stage. There’s a real sense of fun, and not just from the comic duo of Quixote and Sancho Panza (Christopher Saunders and David Yudes), whose picaresque antics are the backdrop to the main focus of the ballet, the love story of Kitri and Basilio. Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov don’t have a partnership that produces passionate sparks, but both dancers have such dazzling technique and utter confidence in each other that they are a sheer joy to watch – and on opening night drew audible gasps of delight from the audience. By the dazzling final pas de deux the grinning pair seemed locked in an ecstatic game of ‘beat that!’, with each solo of firework finale moves upping the ante a touch more. They rightly received a standing ovation. But there’s plenty for the rest of the company to get their teeth into in this warmly inclusive production. Ryoichi Hirano’s strutting matador is fabulously macho, and Laura Morera is perfect as the wildly gesticulating street dancer Mercedes. Itziar Mendizabal and Valentino Zucchetti throw thems

‘Asphodel Meadows’ was the breakthrough work for the choreographer Liam Scarlett, now artist-in-residence at the Royal Ballet. It garnered praise and award nominations when it premiered in 2010; this welcome revival shows it has lost none of its appeal. There’s a deep maturity and sophistication to this short, abstract work, built around Poulenc’s tricksy, intricate ‘Concerto for Two Pianos in D Minor’. The choreography melts into this music, which swings from frantically serious to lushly romantic to jauntily sassy, mashing classical with jazz. The corps flows like water round these multiple musical themes, echoing motifs and playing with contrapuntal movement. Scarlett’s three central pas de deux, meanwhile, each draw out a different emphasis from the score. Laura Morera, who was part of the original cast, and William Bracewell are particularly affecting in the middle duet, combining impressively acrobatic lifts and holds with a touching emotional connection. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting design could be a bit less murky at times, but Scarlett’s lyrical poise and elegance always shine through.   In contrast, Frederick Ashton’s ‘The Two Pigeons’ is a sugary confection from 1961 with a thinly plotted premise that seems pretty outdated now, despite the undoubtedly appealing presence of two real-life performing pigeons who steal the show at the end. It does, however, allow Lauren Cuthbertson and Vadim Muntagirov – perfectly suited partners – to have a lot of fun as the ditzy Young

'Frankenstein' returns to the Royal Opera House in 2019. This review is from its premiere in May 2016. Choreographer Liam Scarlett has shown before that he likes to let his imagination take him (and us) to some very dark places. His ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the Ripper-haunted ‘Sweet Violets’ were unnerving plunges into the shadows; Mary Shelley’s morbid gothic fantasy ‘Frankenstein’ seems a perfect fit. The classic horror story about a young man’s reckless experiment and its dire consequences, is ripe with themes to mine – about power, responsibility, humanity and the limits of science. Scarlett concentrates on its love stories: that of the medical student Victor Frankenstein and his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth, and its mirror image, the rejected love of the Creature for its creator, which curdles into bloodthirsty revenge. The first is fondly evoked, as Federico Bonelli’s brooding Frankenstein and Laura Morera’s sweet Elizabeth sweep round the stage in their duets, with more than a nod to the impetuous, youthful joy and tender urgency of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. Elsewhere, though, Bonelli tussles with the fact that Frankenstein, although at the centre of the plot, isn’t given much of a voice and often seems to be outside the story looking in. But there’s fun to be had when the production reaches joyous heights of B-movie nuttiness inside designer John Macfarlane’s magnificent operating theatre set, complete with gurgling steampunk machines spewing sparks.  Bonelli sh

How to portray the ugly horror of the First World War through a medium as poised and beautiful as ballet? It’s a conundrum that Alistair Marriott struggles with valiantly in ‘The Unknown Soldier’, his new short work for the Royal Ballet, but doesn’t quite find an answer to. His solemn piece opens with video footage of the reminiscences of Florence Billington, who recalled seeing handsome, boisterously excited young men heading off to war. Her own sweetheart also left, never to return. Marriott focused his dance on her story: we saw proud uniformed recruits and women in diaphanous pastels whirling together in last dances; Florence (Yasmine Naghdi) and Ted (Matthew Ball) meeting, falling in love and being parted. Es Devlin’s stark set, Luke Halls’s video projections and Bruno Poet’s lighting keep up a swirl of movement around and above the dancers – but the whole creates a rather cool distance from the drama. Billington never knew what happened to her beau – hence him standing in for the Unknown Soldier – which made it odd that there was a powerfully danced scene with her receiving a telegram about his death. Marriott attempts to fill in the blanks about Ted’s fate by including the veteran Harry Patch’s memories of the last seconds of a dying soldier’s life – Tomas Mock as Patch, cradling the dying Ted on the battlefield, is an awkwardly mannered representation of something so awful. And the final scene, of a near-naked Ted and co, gold-lit and presumably in heaven, was a rathe

The Indian warrior Solor wants the temple dancer Nikiya, with whom he’s been having a secret affair. He also wants the rajah’s daughter, Gamzatti, when she’s presented to him as his wife-to-be. And Gamzatti and her father, when they learn of Solor’s other liaison, want Nikiya dead. Cue a wildly melodramatic 19th-century orientalist fantasy, with wild-haired fakirs, catfights, venomous snakes, opium hallucinations, angry gods, a dancing bronze idol, lust, power, jealousy and death. Phew. La  Bayadère is extravagantly silly but also meltingly beautiful, giving two ballerinas a chance to shine in the main roles of Nikiya and Gamzatti, and, with the opium-dream Kingdom of the Shades section, creating a dreamy, moonlit “white ballet” extravaganza, with two dozen sparkly tutu’d dancers flooding the stage, performing mesmerisingly synchronised arabesques. Marianela Nuñez is gorgeously expressive as Nikiya, who chooses to die rather than go on without Solor, then haunts him to distraction. Natalia Osipova is toweringly haughty and utterly ruthless as Gamzatti - she bears down on her betrothed like a hawk about to snatch her prey. And Vadim Muntagirov soars through Solor’s firecracker solo showpiece. He is more puppyish suitor than ardent lover, maybe, but he partners Nuñez with such elegant confidence that the pair of them look invincible in their pas de deux. The corps has been well drilled – and Yuhui Choe, Yasmine Naghdi and Akane Takada are exquisite as the lead Shades. This is p