REVIEW: Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at the Lyceum, Sheffield

Theatregoers leapt to their feet again at the Lyceum this week – this time for a full house standing ovation. The whistles, whooping, and applause were thunderous. The elated cast swept forwards together again and again to take their bows.

There’s good reason star choreographer Bourne’s genre-defying, gender-defying, take on the classic Swan Lake is now celebrated as it is, 30 years on from its groundbreaking first performances.

It is sensational.

A combination not just of breathtaking modern dance and Tchaikovsky’s soaring score, it is a seminal masterpiece of theatricality, melodrama, genius set design, beautiful costumery, humour and heartbreak.

There’s also a disarmingly resonant story about the gilded cage of royalty. Talk about history repeating itself.

Bourne’s tale shifts the traditional fable to a focus upon a troubled prince grappling with emotional repression, loneliness, and the weight of royal expectation. When it was first performed in 1995, connections couldn’t help but be made with the divorce of Charles, the-then Prince of Wales, from Diana.

Thirty years on, parallels can just as equally be drawn with his son Prince Harry and the reluctant prince, the shackles of a life of duty, pursued by the Press, searching for an authentic life and freedom.

James Lovell plays the tortured prince, so cosseted in his castle that he descends from his enormous bed each morning down a staircase of his long-suffering servants’ backs.

He is pampered, sometimes petulant, but likeable, expressive and young, and you root for him immediately.

Katrina Lyndon is his mother the Queen, with more than a look of Olivia Colman about her features. She has no time for her son’s conflicted reluctance – her life has been stymied by royal duty too – and as she coldly dismisses his pained pleadings, in a memorable scene danced with anguish in the prince’s private quarters, she finds her escape in flirtations and dalliances with her court.

There are lots of laughs to be had, too.

Bryony Wood steals the show, in the first half at least, as the prince’s gauche would-be girlfriend, beautiful in her ballroom-inspired choreography and Material Girl pink dress, hilarious with her exaggerated mouthed asides. The riotous scene in the royal box at the opera is straight from Pretty Woman.

Things get more serious in Act 2 before the interval, as the prince finds himself in a London park beside a sign warning ‘Do Not Feed the Swans’.

When they emerge, hissing, from the mist in their now iconic feathered trousers and bare torsos, a single black diamond painted on their heads to represent their beaks, the famously all-male ensemble of swans is nothing short of terrifying – fiercely mesmersing and majestic, powerful and erotic.

Rory Macleod as both the white Swan and his seductive, destructive counterpart the Stranger, is intense with raw physicality. Every scene in which he features is electric.

Legendary Lez Brotherston’s genius set design only adds to the production’s surreal and cinematic feel.

Swans take flight on grainy screens that overlay clever videography upon the stunning stage scenery, and the nightmarish trick with the royal bed is both ingenious and harrowing.

It is fitting that more than half of the incredible cast of this ‘next generation’ 30th year revival tour are made up of dancers who have grown up through Bourne’s New Adventures talent development programme.

It’s a testament to his commitment to the future of dance as well as tribute to his having reinvented its past.

• Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is at the Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday, May 17.