Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet review: A spiky and youthful Shakespeare reimagining

Dance adaptation of the classic tragedy is staged at Sadler’s Wells in London

Paris Fitzpatrick’s Romeo and Cordelia Braithwaite’s Juliet (Johan Persson)

Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet pits young people against a harsh adult world. This updated dance version shows giddy first love, blooming like a dandelion forcing itself through concrete.

A brilliant dance storyteller, Bourne is known for his social precision. He has a sharp eye for period, for fashion, for how people behave within a society. For this show, created in 2019 with emerging dancers and young co-creatives, he stripped most of that away. Shakespeare’s warring families are out: instead, young people are held in the chilly Verona Institute, an abstract school-prison-laboratory, regulated by oppressive or ineffectual adults.

We get a glimpse of the outside world when Romeo arrives, dumped in the facility by his awful politician parents. Their son is a problem because he has no facade, no public polish. Paris Fitzpatrick’s geeky Romeo is packed with nervous energy, limbs self-consciously gangling.