Swan Lake

After seeing Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake with its famous casting of men as the swans, it’s hard to imagine these birds were ever girls in tutus. While the original swans fluttered on ballet pointe, Bourne’s birds are variously wild and playful, cruel and threatening, muscular and very erotic.

These birds are dangerous -“ they hiss and scratch, and they kill.

Ironically these shifting male moods seem to dovetail even better with Tchaikovsky’s wildly beautiful and ever climaxing score. As for the prince who falls for the lead ballerina, he is now a tormented modern royal escaping repression by running to the feathered freedoms of a male bird.

Bourne’s reworking of the classic ballet in 1995 was lightly dismissed at first as a gay ballet. But after touring the globe for 12 years, his company finally arrives in Australia and we can see that this is not some campy send-up with blokes in drag.

His genius in fact is to add new dark levels of psychology to the original plot and characters. Bludgeoned by palace ritual and desperate for love from his fickle mother, the prince is drawn to the swan for emotional and spiritual solace and for flight and fantasy. It’s not just because the swan is so hot and gorgeous.

Mind you, the prince’s nightmares really begin at the palace ball when the swan arrives as a leather-clad stranger who rampantly seduces all the women, including the queen.

In dramatising a dysfunctional royal family, Bourne follows a familiar creative path in these post-Di days. The Australian Ballet’s Raymonda, even its own Swan Lake from Graeme Murphy and Helen Mirren in The Queen, all dig deep into these same royal corners.

What really distinguishes Bourne’s Swan Lake is the scale and story-telling colour of his spectacular stagecraft. The ball, the jiving local club, the seedy streetscape, and the encounter with swans by the lake or in the prince’s cavernous bed are all lushly dramatised and peopled with real characters and wit.

As the leads Alan Vincent is a little too earth-bound as the swan but Christopher Marney is suitably vulnerable as the prince and Saranne Curtin is a sassy knockout as the queen. The contemporary dance may leave the odd purist missing the pointe, but the ensemble choreography of the boys is spine-tingling, especially as they flock together in the final dark nightmare.

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is at the Capitol Theatre until 18 March, when it tours nationally.