Violent Delights

Only five minutes into John Cranko’s ballet of Romeo and Juliet, the fighting begins: Montagues and Capulets clashing swords to prove which of Verona’s great houses is number one. The scene might be a metaphor for the tussle to produce the ultimate ballet expression of Shakespeare’s evergreen 1597 play about the epic heedlessness of young love. There have been many Romeo and Juliet ballets since the first in 1785, but who created the ultimate one? Was it Cranko or Kenneth MacMillan? Rudolf Nureyev or Frederick Ashton? Diaghilev’s eccentric version caused outrage, Angelin Preljocaj had Stasi-type guard-dogs snarling around Juliet’s bedroom. Every major choreographer seems to have had a go – Yuri Grigorovich, Maurice Béjart, Mark Morris, John Neumeier, Alexei Ratmansky, Matthew Bourne … and of course Graeme Murphy created a contemporary, multimedia version for The Australian Ballet in 2011. As new versions continue to spill onto the world’s stages, politics – like the rivalry in the story – remain central. Do the Russians make better ballets to Russian music, or the British better ballets out of an English story? Or does it take Americans, Albanians or Australians to better express the role of social outsidership? Of course, the key point is, as Shakespeare points out, that the two houses are “both alike in dignity”. They are so evenly matched that the civil war could go on indefinitely. But the final destination of the play is a shocked acknowledgement by the heads of the families that the rivalry is absurd, pointless. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet have not only shown the political and practical cost – tribes left without heirs to pass their bloodily gained power on to – they’ve put the townspeople’s hearts back in their rightful places, so that the community can now imagine the desperate sadness of those two teenagers, killing themselves for their impossible love while their parents continue a mechanical, unwinnable war.

Like the course of true love, the balletification of Romeo and Juliet has never run smooth. Before the 20th century, only two dance versions are recorded, in 1785 in Venice, and in 1811 in Copenhagen; from which we can deduce that ballet could not tackle the tragedy without music that captured the story’s violence, passion and even absurdity – while choreographic language had also to develop to express such tricky states. Most 19th-century ballets had been written to entertain the audience, or to impress them with poetic, physical or exotic effects. The saddest ballets, Giselle and Swan Lake, were soulful and lyrical experiences for the audience rather than detailed narratives of a real tragedy. Meanwhile, great composers everywhere were imagining Shakespeare’s immortal love story in music – just not for ballet. Bellini, Gounod and Delius composed operas, Berlioz a dramatic symphony-cum-cantata, and young Tchaikovsky’s very first masterpiece was his 20-minute symphonic fantasy of Romeo and Juliet (addicts of The Sims may recognise Tchaikovsky’s swooning love theme as the ‘kissing music’).

The most intriguing version of Romeo and Juliet has to be the crazed Surrealist drama-dance-spectacle commissioned by the famed impresario Diaghilev for his celebrated Ballets Russes in the 1920s. It had jazzy, light-hearted music by a 20-year-old English composer, Constant Lambert. At the end the lovers dashed away together wearing aviator goggles. Diaghilev was not interested in the tragedy – he planned a comedy entertainment about dancers rehearsing a Romeo and Juliet ballet while mainly concerned with their own love affairs. He got the Surrealists Max Ernst and Joan Miró to design it, ignoring his shy young composer’s futile protests about the sabotaging of his music by “imbeciles”. Meanwhile, the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska was equally bewildered, as she thought she was supposed to be creating a balletic drama. The Paris premiere in 1926 of this smorgasbord of deliberate confusions was disrupted by a mass demonstration by whistling Surrealists and communists who accused the left- wing Ernst and Miró of colluding with capitalists, though some critics thought the whole thing a rather witty lark. Alas, that toothsome production sank to join less fascinating ballet wrecks in the vast trench of oblivion.

All changed in 1940, when the Kirov Ballet’s chief Leonid Lavrovsky unveiled the official premiere staging of an epic new Romeo and Juliet ballet score by the leading Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. The music had been commanded for the Bolshoi and Kirov Theatres, but Soviet authorities found it challenging and its first staging was in fact by Prague National Ballet in 1938.

If nothing else, the Brno production proved the music’s power, and the Kirov acted fast. Their spectacle was opulent on a Soviet scale, rich in dynamic dancing, with a cumbersome melodramatic structure that Prokofiev much disliked, but a Juliet, Galina Ulanova, whose extraordinarily delicate expressiveness exposed the futility of the Montagues’ and Capulets’ power games. Since World War II was raging, no one in the West could see the Soviet production, but Prokofiev’s score, sumptuous, violent and tender, was immediately the talk of musical circles. Suggestions in 1943 that New York’s Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) might do its own staging came to nothing when both Michel Fokine and Antony Tudor found the score’s monumentalism uncongenial – Tudor turned to Delius instead. The Swedish experimentalist Birgit Cullberg did a reduced contemporary dance version in Stockholm in 1944. But once Lavrovsky transferred his Kirov staging – and his luminous star, Ulanova – to the Bolshoi in 1946, a new chapter of ballet history began. Ever since then, for over 75 years, Prokofiev’s score has been as synonymous with Romeo and Juliet as Tchaikovsky’s is synonymous with Swan Lake The production won international plaudits after the Soviets showed a film of it (with Ulanova) at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, and the British choreographer Frederick Ashton – a proven master of ecstatic suggestion – proposed making a Romeo and Juliet for Sadler’s Wells Ballet. For bureaucratic reasons, he ended up doing it for the Royal Danish Ballet instead, and his Mozartian, intimate choreography remains prized for the neo-classical beauty and intensity of the lovers’ duets. At last, in 1956, the legendary Lavrovsky Romeo and Juliet, starring Ulanova, made its stage debut in the West on the Bolshoi Ballet’s first tour of London. Dazzled but dismayed, Western choreographers knew it had changed the game, both musically and theatrically. Covent Garden at first hoped to pull strings with the Soviet government to acquire the Russian staging for The Royal Ballet, for Ashton didn't feel he could bring his modest Danish version to his home company after the fierce light cast by the Bolshoi’s. But who else could do the job?

It turned out that it would be a Royal Ballet man – but not in London. At 30, John Cranko, the most experienced of London’s rising choreographers, was feeling underemployed, and stifled by the competitive atmosphere of Covent Garden; he leapt to accept La Scala Ballet’s invitation to create an amphitheatre version of Romeo and Juliet on the Venetian island of San Giorgio, using the Prokofiev score. For this large open-air space, where scenery was limited, he emphasised the vigour of dancing itself, and talent-spotted the 20-year-old Carla Fracci, who would make her name as Juliet. His La Scala version provided the basis for his landmark production for Stuttgart Ballet four years later, after he left Covent Garden in 1961 to become Stuttgart’s chief. (The year 1962 was an auspicious one. Not only did Cranko create his now renowned Romeo and Juliet, but his old friend Peggy van Praagh founded The Australian Ballet. The company first danced Cranko’s production in 1974, and the two have been intertwined ever since.) 

Luscious designs by the 25-year-old Jürgen Rose disguised Stuttgart’s smaller forces, and are acclaimed to this day. And Cranko offered a modern theatrical immediacy and a more contemporary characterisation than the Soviets, especially for Romeo and his friends, though choreographic highlights like Lady Capulet’s flamboyant mourning over Tybalt unavoidably echoed the Bolshoi’s, so meticulously did Prokofiev's music paint the scenes. Once again the Juliet was a Cranko discovery from the corps de ballet – a new Brazilian recruit, Marcia Haydée.

Leading critics hailed Cranko’s fresh, yet affecting choreography, likening him to Fokine in his mastery of natural movement. The New York Times declared that he had achieved an ideal compromise between the Soviets’ dance-drama and Ashton’s neo-classical ballet. The production would be staged worldwide, at the National Ballet of Canada, Munich Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Vienna State Opera Ballet, La Scala Ballet, Scottish Ballet and The Australian Ballet.

The Royal Ballet gnashed their teeth. Ashton, now artistic director, finally asked Kenneth MacMillan, two years younger than Cranko, to take on Romeo and Juliet for his first full-length ballet. Just as Cranko borrowed from Lavrovsky, so MacMillan borrowed from Cranko, as people comment to this day. Yet the ‘borrowing and improving’ process has always been intrinsic to ballet. To frame it as plagiarism ignores the natural osmosis of imaginative influences on dancers who become choreographers, and choreographers responding to current artistic conditions, performance culture and contemporary society. MacMillan had been struck by a naturalistic new theatre production by Franco Zeffirelli at the Old Vic, with the young Judi Dench as Juliet, and although the 1965 ballet’s concept had to be on a Royal scale and the story conservatively told, its uninhibited young lovers expressed in their duets the sexual revolution of 60s London. It was natural that Cranko influenced his own dancer John Neumeier’s 1971 version, just as MacMillan’s influenced the in- the-round 1998 version of his dancer Derek Deane. Nureyev’s un-tender 1977 production for London Festival Ballet reacted against his long experience of dancing MacMillan’s Romeo since he and Margot Fonteyn had premiered it – and his Soviet experience of political ruthlessness, and the brilliantly streetwise Leonard Bernstein/Jerome Robbins update of the play, West Side Story. 

You could spend hours playing Fantasy Romeo and Juliet, and patch together your favourite moments from each, but Prokofiev and Shakespeare’s DNA runs through them all. As The Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director David Hallberg says, “What makes the ballet so special, first of all, is that music. Prokofiev composed the music to the action. You can hear how you fall in love.”

One of the great Juliets of our time, the ballerina Tamara Rojo (now directing English National Ballet in London) performed the Cranko, MacMillan, Nureyev and Deane versions and knows the Ashton and Lavrovsky. She finds that with such prescriptive music there are bound to be narrative and dynamic similarities, yet the various versions eachhave real artistic individuality. “Ashton’s choreography is already a huge aesthetic step forward from the Bolshoi one, which is quite static, giving the Soviet audiences pictures to see,” she observes. “Cranko made a huge improvement in directing movement into the story, and Kenneth MacMillan created these far more natural relationships. And you can see how influenced Cranko and MacMillan were in their choreography by particular dancers like Marcia Haydée and Lynn Seymour. “Rudolf’s is the most faithful translation of the actual play, and it’s much more powerful about the social environment – he was a Soviet defector after all. We understand the danger, we feel the urgency of lovers to stay alive at a time of death. But I think Nureyev lacks romanticism in the duets! I did enjoy dancing Derek Deane’s in-the- round version, because taking away the stage produced a very free and natural environment. You’re not performing for anyone, you are doing it within the characters.”

Last word to David Hallberg, who admits to having sobbed through many a Romeo and Juliet. “John Cranko created not only gorgeous pas de deux for the lovers but his dramatic art is so successful, and he told the story so simply but so richly through the music, that it does Romeo and Juliet complete justice. It’s through and through a story that remains at the heart of emotion, and love, and heartbreak, and death. Everyone knows those emotions. It punches you in the gut.”

This article was originally published in the 2022 Romeo and Juliet souvenir program.