The missus is a sucker for ballet and she likes Matthew Bourne so we are now in the habit of going to Sadlers Wells whenever he has a show on. And Saturday night we saw his version of Swan Lake. To nutshell this it tells the story of a psychologically disturbed prince who’s starved of affection by his cruel mother. Not comfortable in his public role of a prince and starved of real love, he’s on the verge of suicide when he sees/dreams about swans at play in a lake and falls for one of them, thus deciding not to top himself.
Now happy that he has a reason to live he carries on as a prince but eventually loses his mind yet again because he can’t have the female object of his affections and he ends up trying to shoot his mother. Instead he shoots the girl he once/possibly still loved.
He’s then carted off to an asylum where he sees/imagines the swan coming to save him but the bird gets killed by his swan peers for deserting the pack (or whatever groups of swans are called).
The story sound utterly bonkers and it gets a bit more bizarre when one of Bourne’s main twists (apart from drawing parallels with our own royal family and the paparazzi) is that the swans are an all-male ensemble.
It’s a stunningly beautiful and moving evocation of repressed emotion, loneliness and denial versus the redemptive power of love and the imagination. Or it’s about a nutter who wants to bum a swan. You decide…
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