Matthew Bourne’s Romeo + Juliet at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh

Matthew Bourne is a genius…I've probably said it before. His re-imaginings of classical ballets never fail to amaze, and delight, me. I'm in total awe.

Thirty-one years after his first ballet, Romeo + Juliet premiered in 2019 and in this, its latest airing, the opening sounds of chains clanking do little to prepare us for what is to come.

Like a bomb blast, Prokofiev's stirring Dance of the Knights explodes into the auditorium and we're transported into a sterile world of white-clad, drugged youngsters in a robotic dance, all incarcerated in the Verona Institute, part-asylum, part-borstal.

This is Bourne's setting for one of the oldest, greatest love stories ever written. And yet everything about it is bang up-to-date, and should be part of the school syllabus for so many reasons. These are young dancers who can introduce young people to the Arts, and in a way they can understand. It's a stripped back retelling, laying bare mental illness, knife crime, bigotry, homophobia, and the madness of that first love. And yet it's run through with such beauty and tenderness as Romeo and Juliet – performed passionately and with great vulnerability by Rory Macleod and Cordelia Brathwaite – find each other, if only for the duration of the show.

Romeo and Juliet's illicit love and their unfortunate ending may be the only things you'll recognise from Shakespeare's story. But the clues are there. Although there are no waring Capulets and Montagues, Romeo's rival Tybalt, danced with a tremendous, terrifying presence by Danny Reubens, is very much in the picture as the guard besotted with Juliet, and Friar Laurence switches gender to become the hapless Rev Bernadette, with Daisy May Kemp providing an endearing injection of comedic prowess. As for the balcony scene, there's only a metal walkway above the white-tiled set, which provides not so much a place to proclaim undying love as one from which there are some jaw-dropping acrobatics. Another jaw-dropping moment? The longest kiss in dance history!

Matthew Bourne's Romeo + Juliet is at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh until September 23.

Box Office: 0131 529 6000

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