Oh, the beauty

Saw Kenneth Macmillan's Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House on Thursday. Alina Cojocaru and Johann Kobborg. Forced myself out of bed at the unheard of time of 9am to queue briefly for day tickets -- got one in the stalls circle, so a sideways on view but close to the stage. Turned out to be a gorgeous place to sit, as Macmillan's ballets call for acting as well as perfect pirouettes, and from that close the acting is visible -- and what acting it was. Not that they are mutually exclusive: his steps are always an illustration of a personal emotion. Whether Lady Capulet's soul-shattering grief, clenched fists beating the ground over Tybalt; or Romeo's sheer joy (perhaps with a tinge of macho showing off?) at the beginning of the balcony scene, turns in attitude and exuberant tours jetes; or Juliet's stiffness as she dances with Paris after her lover has left with the morning sun.

It has been a while since a ballet has affected me so deeply, not since Cranko's Onegin several years ago, also with Alina. (Mayerling was for me a bit too much; syphilictic madness I can't relate to as much I can love..) Alina is so small she is totally believable as Juliet, but not just in the girlish first scenes -- she grows so much with the ballet, it is apparent already as she begs Romeo not to leave; as she sits for that interminable time on her bed gathering her courage to run to Friar Lawrence; and it is truly heartrending when she awakes to find Romeo dead, kisses his lifeless lips. Kobborg's Romeo was interesting, heroic but with a careless side, a dark side; his dancing was clean and perfect. The marketplace scenes had so much little detail for each corps dancer you never tired of picking out new vignettes happening in a corner of the stage. The sheer power of the balcony scene, lifted by Prokofiev's soaring music, confirmed it for me as my favourite piece of ballet ever. And in Act III as the tragedy wound its way to its conclusion, I thought that the power of ballet to tell a story and to move audiences surely must be at its pinnacle here. It was not Shakespeare made pretty and put en pointe; it was Shakespeare itself, dance proving a more than able replacement for words -- and perhaps more global.