Last night the audience in the packed auditorium at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley was treated to a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s much-loved ballet Romeo and Juliet – brought to life by the Moscow City Ballet. It was a stylish production, with Natalya Povago’s design staying loyal to the Elizabethan era that spawned Shakespeare’s play; with rich, colourful period costumes, and imaginative drapes evocative of the Renaissance Italian art of the time.
The most famous family rivalry in all literature – between the Montagues and the Capulets – was established in the opening scenes with clashes between greens and purples, the costume colours worn like those of opposing sporting teams; with the dancers evoking animosity and cementing the drama of the story from the start, with hot-headed young men strutting like peacocks as they threw insults across the stage.
Tall, fair, light as a feather and dressed all in white, Sergei Zolotarev made a graceful and immediate presence as Romeo. The petite and dark-haired Valeriya Guseva, often dressed in red, captured the innocence and joy of Juliet. Crucially, they complemented each other extremely well, and were instantly believable as the love-struck teenagers. Whilst their dancing held the audience spellbound, creating the illusion of effortlessness with the most demanding of moves, the most entertaining of the company, who received a good number of laughs, was Gennady Batalov as Mercutio. Relishing his role as the funniest character, Batalov nevertheless still had to convey the frivolity and raucous humour of Romeo’s best friend, and he managed this brilliantly, giving an extremely warm and enjoyable performance full of well-timed mannerisms and gestures that never strayed over the top. This production gave plenty of space for individual performances, and Varvara Garagulya won the sympathy of the audience as Juliet’s much-teased Nurse, the butt of everyone’s jokes and, apart from Aleksandr Gavrilov, encumbered by full habit as Friar Lawrence, the clumsiest and least mobile of the characters, which must be a challenge for any dancer to convey.
There are three aspects to the story brought out in Prokofiev’s inventive music, and they were all fully explored in the production. The rivalry, a clash of colours as well as of foils in some exhilarating swordplay, was well accounted for. One of Prokofiev’s most famous pieces is the Montagues and Capulets movement from this ballet, and both musicians and dancers rose to the challenge of matching the audience’s expectations as soon as the evocative brass sounds. The black-clad Tybalt, prince of cats (Talgat Kozhabayev), was especially scary on stage, timing his movements to perfection against the enthusiastic percussion. Also well conveyed was the love between Romeo and Juliet, and even the unrequited love between Paris and Juliet. The third aspect is death, always present in abundance in any Shakespearean tragedy, but this is often overshadowed in Romeo and Juliet by the central love story. In this production, the deaths were realized very effectively. The usual bright colours and strong lights became subdued, and supporting dancers, wearing sinister black drapes or facemasks, crawled about the stage like phantoms, slowly enveloping the dying character, creating a literally haunting image. Just as Shakespeare shades the rest of the play by announcing the tragic end in his prologue, so this production did the same, with the ballet ending where it had begun, with the corpses held upside-down by the black-draped phantoms, and Prokofiev’s music finishing the effect.
Conducting the Moscow City Ballet Orchestra was veteran Igor Shavruk, who layered plenty of light and shade into the performances of his near pitch-perfect musicians. The music and the action flowed well throughout, apart from immediately after the second interval, where it took the audience a while to warm back into the story. This is regrettable, as the second act had built up a thrilling momentum, and it may have been preferable to run straight through; as the second break followed by a long dance of the preparation for the wedding that never happens – between Juliet and Paris – deflated the carefully earned suspense. It’s credit to the principals, especially Valeriya Guseva’s increasingly dark and frantic Juliet, that the audience was in the thrall of the performance once again by the time of the tragic climax.
At the curtain call, the dancers basked in a long applause, rightly bringing Igor Shavruk onto the stage to take a bow. The five principals held the limelight to show their appreciation to the audience, and in the spontaneous banter between them, with Tybalt and Mercutio overcoming their dramatic differences and shaking hands, they showed they had enjoyed performing just as much as the audience had enjoyed watching.
