Review: Bourne’s New Adventures: ‘Swan Lake’ still shocks with its transgressive beauty

It seems like just yesterday that Matthew Bourne’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of a classic triggered gents to walk out at the sight of two men partnered and young girls to cry when confronted with a narrative so different from the storybook tutued tale they had anticipated.

A quarter-century later, his radical take still shocks, but less for its societal transgression than for its sheer beauty. He doesn’t disavow, he says, its popular tag as a “gay Swan Lake,” but contends, for good reason, that the moniker understates its complexity.

Yes, his version, with its feisty, barefoot, bare-chested male swans, searingly defies gender roles but it more broadly satirizes traditional, constrictive ballet types of all kinds and leans hard into the winds of pop culture and Hitchcockian melodrama.

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake closes January 26, 2020. DCTS details and tickets

To Tchaikovsky’s score, etched into our collective hippocampus, it intermingles with a classical movement vocabulary avant-garde, East Asian, jazz, and hip-swinging social dance. It firmly establishes the pungent mix of humor and tragedy that spices Bourne’s later work. And seen with a little historical distance, it also feels part of its era, its winged temptor-saviors theatrical cousins to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America from several years prior. Like those angels, Bourne’s swans, for a generation reeling from the decimation of the AIDS epidemic, were — and remain — powerful emblems of homoerotic grace, death, and freedom.

Seeing Bourne’s Swan Lake Wednesday night, I was also struck by the work’s revolutionary impact. It famously inspired, as reflected in the 2000 film Billy Elliot, a generation of young male dancers to discover their inner swans. But the boldness of its conception and staging also echoes, to my mind, in many works since by other choreographers. I’m thinking, for instance, of the protagonists’ raw bedroom sensuality and vulnerability in John Neumeir’s Little Mermaid. Or the expressionistic medical horrors in that work and in Alexei Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream.

If you’ve not seen Bourne’s Swan Lake since its storied mid-90s opening and legendary run in the West End and abroad, its whimsically imaginative set and costumes by Lez Brotherston (with a minor glitch Wednesday involving a banner not unfurling) have been revitalized. Its libretto is smarter and leaner. Reduced now is a peripheral plot line about a manipulative Private Secretary and his insinuation of a silly Girlfriend to distract the Prince and win favor with the Queen. The Secretary and the Girlfriend are still present, but their motives aren’t particularly at issue, which is fine. There’s more than enough psychodrama to occupy us for two and a half hours as the Prince, unenthusiastically assuming his official duties, seeks affection from his chilly Queen mother and discovers that his libido is not standard issue.

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While diverted by the Girlfriend and sundry other princesses in the offing, he longs, to the point of suicidal despair, for something different. Just what that something is comes to him in a lakeside reverie — one that reverberates from a childhood nightmare — of powerful male swans. While their female Marius Petipa forebears were gracefully stoic, these swans strut, sweat, swagger, and swipe. In Acts Three and Four, a Stranger at the royal ball awakens the Prince’s Swan lust while furthering his Oedipal confusion by courting the Queen. And when the party gets out of hand, the Prince is left in mental and sexual shambles before one last cathartic ambivalent showdown with his winged demon lover.

Wednesday night, the Prince was danced by an acrobatically anguished James Lovell, and the Swan and Stranger by the darkly vigorous Max Westwell. Lovell is a fascinating boy-man whose nightmares and dreams converge into the distilled, ravenous purity of want. In his Stranger incarnation, Westwell — outfitted in leather pants, swigging flutes of champagne and tossing back shots, throwing men and women around with equal brashness — is Gomez Addams, Jack Sparrow, and Prince Tom of Finland all wrapped up in one. In their partnering, Westwell plays rough — teasing, tantalizing, threatening. Lovell ducks, darts, and surrenders, then pitifully tries to intervene in the Stranger’s seduction of the Queen, lest the Prince’s two unreachable loves connect in an obliterating vortex of dominating distance.

Katrina Lyndon is a hilarious girlfriend — déclassée among the starchy royals, mugging for the paparazzi, a good-time gal in contrast to the sly, sybaritic princesses she is ostensibly competing with for the closeted Prince’s eye. (The cloistered plotting of the court can’t help but bring to mind the names Harry and Meghan.)

Nicole Kaberra is a finely frosty Queen, with her brazen red dress, her Bride of Frankenstein dye job, her lecherous leaps onto the Stranger and gropes of unsuspecting soldiers. The only man she seems unable to touch is her son, whose want of tenderness as a child has warped — in an absorbingly disconcerting Act One pas de deux — into something more turbulently lustful toward her as an adult. 

Then, of course, there are those unforgettable swans. Whether at the lake or in the Prince’s bedroom, this beautiful, bestial bevy, huffing in affront or menace, chillingly insinuates its way not only into the Prince’s subconscious iconography but into ours.

Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures:  Swan Lake. Director and choreographer, Matthew Bourne. Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Set and costume design, Lez Brotherston. Lighting designer, Paule Constable. Sound designer, Ken Hampton. Video designer, Duncan McLean. Associate Artistic Director Etta Murfitt. Featured dancers: Max Westwell, James Lovell, Nicole Kabera, Katrina Lyndon, Jack Jones, Mari Kamata, Nicole Alphonce, Katie Webb, Michaela Guibarra, Kayla Collymore, Freya Field, Zanna Cornelis, Alistair Beattie, Andrew Ashton, Jonathon Luke Baker, Callum Bowman, Isaac Bowry, João Castro, Cameron Everitt, Keenan Fletcher, Nicholas Keegan, Ashley-Jordon Packer, Barnaby Quarendon, Sam Salter, Mark Samaras, Alex Sturman, Sam West. Reviewed by Alexander C. Kafka.