making swan lake dangerous
by Douglas Messerli
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(composer), Matthew Bourne director and choreographer Matthew Bourne’s
Swan Lake / 2019 (the review below was written after I saw a live
production in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre on December 10,
2019, after which I watched the film version).
In 1995 English dancer
and choreographer Matthew Bourne did something quite audacious in the world of
ballet by taking the often-stuffy tutu-laden Tchaikovsky ballet Swan
Lake into a world of a fantasy about the psychological turmoil of
coming to terms with one’s gay sexuality. He was grandly helped by the set and
costume design of Lez Brotherston.
While
keeping much of the basic story of the original, particularly the romantic tale
of a young Prince falling in love with a swan, by transforming the basic tale
into a modern-day story of royalty not so very different from the Court of
Queen Elizabeth, he presented the myth through a very different lens. Except
for the fact that this young Prince, having daily to face the cold and distant
attentions of the Queen (elegantly and often humorously performed by Nicole Kabera
in the production I saw and, in the film), is clearly not the obviously
heterosexual Prince Charles; but you might well understand why Australian
choreographer Graeme Murphy was tempted to embrace this ballet into the context
of Charles’ marriage to Princess Diana.
Yet
Bourne keeps the more mysterious elements of ballet intact, partly by
representing the highly-regulated life of the young Prince through a corps of
servants, all looking a bit like his disapproving but, nonetheless, sexually
active mother, as they bathe the young prince, brush his teeth, and dress him
each morning, to which the audience with whom I was attending broke out in
laughter.
The
young prince of Bourne’s production simply wants love and seeks it out first
with a vivacious woman intruder (Katrina Lyndon), titled in the program simply
as “The Girlfriend.” This gauche young woman, clearly hated by the Queen, is
certainly no friend and is less a young girl than an outright tart. The Queen,
obviously, wants her son to marry someone of his own class, made clear in the
attendees of “The Royal Ball” in Act Three. Actually, she is planted into the royal
castle by the Queen’s “Private Secretary” (Jack Jones), who hopes to bring down
the monarchy and put himself as the Head of State.
The
Prince (Andrew Monaghan / Liam Mower in the film) clumsily attempts to dance
with the intruder while attending a very funny ballet performance, which wittily imitates earlier productions of this same ballet,
with his mother, secretary von Rothbart, and his sudden “girlfriend,”
He
even attempts to track her down in a sleazy bar, The Swank, where lusty men and
women dance quite licentiously—clearly a world to which the innocent young man
is not accustomed. When he finds that even the new girlfriend is completely
disinterested in him, he mopes alone at a separate table and is eventually
tossed out into the streets by the sailors who inhabit the disco.
Despondent,
he wanders off to a nearby park wherein, on a lake, several swans swim. Bourne
has already shown us that the Prince has had nightmares about the swans, and
now we witness a sign posted nearby warning visitors not to feed the swans. We
can only recognize that the food on which the swans might feed are not bags of
fish-chips, but the bodies of male human beings—precisely, after posting a note
about his suicide, the Prince feeds them himself as he quickly becomes enthralled
with the virile naked torsos and feather covered leggings of Bourne’s leaping
and flying dancers.
The
lead swan (Max Westwell / William Bozier in the film production), in particular
captures his heart, and after a series of teasing and flirting gestures, takes
the young courtier into a pas de deux that, in part because of
its daring gender shifts, is far more sensuous than anything possible in other Swan
Lakes—although we might imagine that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky might have
loved it!
The
outstretched inviting hands, always imitating the neck gestures of swans, are
accepted and rejected, while the common male-female lifts of the Prince into
the Swan’s arms represent the former’s transformation into a human-animal
engagement of sexual bliss that as strange almost as what Edward Albee
describes in his odd 2002 play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
After
all, this is not the first time that animals have transformed themselves into
animals in order to seduce the human race: one need only to remind ourselves of
Zeus’ transformation into a swan in order to impregnate Leda.
In
part, Bourne’s ballet gives the heterosexual world a vision of what it means to
“come out,” as the beautiful Prince, now transformed by the male version of the
traditional version’s Odette, becomes obsessed with his new lover. Is it at all
surprising that he sees the face of the Swan in another intruder into the
court, the Royal Ball the Queen has commanded to present numerous international
beauties from which her son will have to choose for a proper wife?
These
supposed “beauties,” particularly once the sexual “Stranger” (as in the
original wherein Odette appeared as Odile) enters—seemingly a human version of
the Prince’s swan-lover—become equally enchanted the man, entering into
tarantellas and tango-like entanglements with the man, whom the Prince now
shockingly perceives as a kind of reversal of behavior, a “black” swan-like
being (dressed in a black waist coat and black leather pants), if nothing else
a darker, far more aggressive vision of his gentler new-found lover.
Seduced
all over again, but shocked by the darker aspects of his love, is it any wonder
that the young innocent resorts to violence, ultimately killing his
“Girlfriend” in the process?
As
in so many such family situations, the sexually “confused” young son is
incarcerated in an asylum, looked after by an army of a doctor and nurses, all
of whom, as in the first scene, appear to be various apparitions of his
dominating mother. Bourne almost seems to be hinting here of gay conversion
therapy, which often makes the patient go mad.
Laid
into his over large bed by his nurses, the demons of his sexual desires are let
loose, the swans coming out, as in a horrified child’s dream, from under the
bed itself, even from within the mattress to haunt him. Although the lead swan
reappears in an attempt to calm the sufferer, the swan corps turn
on both of them, terrifying the Prince.
Bourne
has brought us, as I read it, into a kind of mad gay bar wherein everyone wants
a piece of action with the cutest man in the room, which Monaghan clearly is.
There are subtle hints here even of The Red Shoes (a ballet in
which Monaghan has performed), as the Prince, once he has accepted his
longings, cannot escape the consequences of his own open sexuality, dancing
himself impossibly into death.
Here
there are no grand jetés, assembles, or even graceful lifts. The sweaty male
torsos now shift from the sensual into almost a demand for a swan-orgy. And the
only grand leap is the one in which the Prince, utterly exhausted, jumps into
death, where he can finally join the lead Swan into an embrace of eternity.
What
we realize in Bourne’s brilliant re-creation of this balletic chestnut is how
fresh it can still be and how marvelously accurate it is its conception. Swan
Lake, with its infusions of myth and fairy-tale, must have seemed almost dangerous
upon its original production—although it was, at first, not particularly
popular, and only later came to be seen as a major work of art. But Bourne in
1995 Bourne re-energized it, made it come alive as a dangerous work again. And
in the wonderful production which I visited last night, subtitled “The Legend
Returns,” we are truly brought back into that magical world where humans
copulate with swans, and swans are freed to become almost human, and queer
humans at that.
Los Angeles, December
11, 2019
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (December 2019).
