Swan Lake, Sadler's Wells review - 30 years on, as bold and brilliant as ever

How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.

As usual with Bourne, the production will have been adjusted slightly with each iteration, but it’s possible to compare the 30th anniversary version with the 1995 one, of which handily there is a DVD. The accumulated tweaks are minor. The giant crown hanging in the Prince’s rooms is now a vibrant scarlet, as is the Queen’s ballgown, popping out of her otherwise black surroundings and underlining her promiscuous sexuality. A Warhol portrait of her à la Marilyn has now joined the royal collection.

The passing of time has made other tweaks desirable. At the spoof 19th-century ballet the royal family attend, the Prince’s Girlfriend is castigated for having a ringing mobile phone, not eating a bag of sweets. The Queen’s corgi has also had a tech upgrade, animatronically speaking. And the company now fields Black swans, two at the performance I went to. 

Overall, there seem to be fewer background mini-dramas going on, which leaves the spotlight firmly on the Prince, his relationship with the Swan and his estrangement from his chilly, undemonstrative mother. Even the Private Secretary’s Rothbart-ish machinations seem less prominent. This is squarely a drama of a lost boy finding a source of immense happiness, however briefly. And as such it is wounding and tender.Bourne is rotating three sets of leads for the London run. I saw Stephen Murray (pictured above with Jackson Fisch) as the Prince and Jackson Fisch as the Swan/Stranger, both outstanding. Murray was an affecting Edward Scissorhands in the most recent revival of that Bourne piece, and he brings the same latent innocence to the Prince, as well as the sense that, rattled and unhappy, he can turn febrile and dangerous. His transformation after first encountering the Swans is palpable: he literally jumps for joy. 

An Australian dancer who joined New Adventures in 2018, Fisch has an impressive physicality befitting his lead-swan status, powerfully leaping and capering with total commitment while hinting at an inner gentleness; he also has a sensuality that grows with his closeness to the Prince. Then when he reappears as the Stranger (pictured below, with Molly Shaw-Downie) in the ball scene – the black swan in Act 3 of the classical ballet – he transforms into a swaggering, sexually smouldering man who partners every woman in the room, not least the Queen, with the promise of excitingly rough handling. It’s thrilling stuff. Bourne gives these couplings the brusque moves of apache and tango, taking the music of Tchaikovsky’s national dances to another level. All the performers in this scene are jaw-droppingly excellent, one woman executing scissoring extensions with a flash of long-legged brilliance.

This is the most important takeaway from the piece for me. It isn’t just that with it Bourne created a pioneering (for the time) scenario involving same-sex partnering and made it mainstream; he did the same for the whole project of dancing. His steps are specialist in their unique way, calling on dancing styles from tap to classical, but they are always understandable, there to communicate emotions and moods that are common to all, petty or grandiloquent. There could be no more obvious contrast to this approach than the formal ballet the royal family attend, whose central character is a dying moth (presumably alluding to Marie Taglioni’s Butterfly, whose costume she is wearing). It’s lovingly done but ludicrous. No wonder the Girlfriend cackles at it.

Bourne’s cheeky relationship with classical ballet is especially obvious in the choreography he gives his 14 Swans. They get, in effect, a standard “white scene”, with a snaking one-by-one arrival like the corps in white in Giselle and La Bayadère. Except those are performed almost in slow motion; here the Swans are doing the signature move Bourne returns to throughout, a leaping forward-kick, and doing it at speed. These are powerful creatures. He even retains the four little Swans, except that, unlike Petipa’s, they really do express the waywardness of the young, stamping and kicking their feet at an angle, camp and mischievous. 

In all the dancing there is pinpoint-perfect synchronisation of moves with music. A decisive gesture is paired with a key beat. Perhaps because I was sitting further forward for this performance than I ever have before, I was also fully tuned into the sounds the Swans make: their hisses and rhythmic pants, the stamps of their bare feet. These unison noises make it clear these creatures operate in a pack and are potentially vicious, reined in by their leader, but dark-eyed and essentially alien. 

Against this wildness, the somewhat more formal moves of the Prince and the Swan, to Tchaikovsky’s music for the Act 2 pas de deux, are compellingly beautiful. The Prince at first merely mimics the Swan, one step behind him, but by the end of the lakeside scene they are moving as one, a true pairing, wheeling around the stage doing the same steps. The Prince has literally found a true partner to cling to – a remarkable hugging-lift, his body curled up against the Swan’s, that recurs throughout, even in death. This is a night of the finest dancing, at every level, in a piece that isn't just a reinvention of a classic, but a contemporary classic itself. Bravi.

• Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells until 26 January, then touring until 7 June 2025
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