There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The violence of the subject was matched by the goings-on in the wings, the scrap over the first-night casting, in which the original Juliet, the young Lynn Seymour, found herself relegated down the list having had an abortion to take the role. Due to Machiavellian box-office politics, the première was staged with Fonteyn and Nureyev as the young lovers, and rising star MacMillan, horrified at being steamrollered, quit the Royal Ballet.
None of the smell of blood and fury survives in the Royal Ballet’s scrupulously scrubbed-down 50th anniversary staging. Though there is a splendid new conductor in the pit, Koen Kessels, and the dust seems to have been blown off the lighting on Nicholas Georgiadis’s masterly sets and costumes, the stage atmosphere felt uncharged, a polite homage to the past. Someone has coached the guts out of the ballet.
Sarah Lamb, as pale as a sliver of the moon, performs Juliet docilely and prettily, with delicate fingers and pointed feet at all times. Disappointingly the exultant dancing of Vadim Muntagirov, in his much-awaited debut as Romeo, was not coached with enough thespian sophistication to put an emotional rocket under this placid last-minute coupling, which came about when the fiery Natalia Osipova withdrew due to injury. The Mercutio and Benvolio of Valentino Zucchetti and James Hay seemed like small boys at play. Christopher Saunders characteristically made Lord Capulet a bore, and only Thiago Soares’s glowering Tybalt and Bennet Gartside’s Escalus hailed from somewhere conscious of life being brutish and short.
How could this happen? Given the music, written by Prokofiev in the grim Soviet Thirties, and its roaring and weeping; and given the rebellion of the Sixties teenagers MacMillan was accessing in his ballet, with his headstrong love scenes and ugly, necrophiliac last pas de deux.
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