Mark Morris: Romeo & Juliet

I like stories. And I like dance. So you'd think I'd be all over narrative ballet. It's storytelling in dance form! All boxes ticked, right? But watching Mark Morris's Romeo & Juliet at the Barbican over the weekend I felt a stealthy malaise come over me. What on earth, I kept thinking, is the point of this?

To rewind a little, I don't know much about ballet, though I've seen three or four, and I do enjoy contemporary dance. Mark Morris is a key contemporary choreographer - one I've never seen before - and I was excited to read he's be staging Prokoviev's R&J, as I love the score. To add to my interest, Morris had chosen to direct Prokoviev's never-heard original version of the score, in which the friar does reach Romeo in time and saves the day, and the lovers don't die. This radical version was instantly suppressed by Stalin who took a dim view of pro-Christian propaganda (either that or he had surprisingly purist feelings about Shakespeare.) So I thought it would be eclectic and unusual and quite different from traditional classical ballet. And entertaining, naturally.

Well, to begin with I have to say that I didn't notice anything particularly different in Mark Morris's choreography than I would expect from any classical ballet. There was some nudity and a bit of simulated sex at the opening of the third act (big disappointment for the people in front of us who went home after the first two), and two of the main male roles (Mercutio and Tybalt) were played by women - an inspired decision which allowed for an excess of swagger and playfulness around sexuality which wouldn't have been possible with male dancers - think the exaggerated femininity of a drag queen in reverse.

But aside from that it was disappointingly predictable. I'd even go so far as to say that it was a distressingly literal reading of the work, with lots of crowd scenes where people come in and mime saying oh hello, nice to see you, is that the time and so on. It actually reminded me of watching Playschool. The bits with the Friar were particularly cringe-inducing, poor chap - lots of miming around the poison "if you DRINK this you will SLEEP and then you'll appear DEAD but when the SUN COMES UP you will WAKE" - imagine miming that, and you're pretty much there. Maybe it's not Morris's fault - there is a lot of story in Romeo and Juliet, and I suppose you've got to make sure the audience is following the drift. But it was the very adherence to narrative that I found so off-putting. I was hoping for something oblique, an emotional reading, deboned of story, but suffused with a deeper truth. They call Mark Morris an iconoclast after all. What I got was exposition through gesture, and lots of it.

Thankfully there was a saving grace - quite literally - in the form of Rita Donahue as Juliet. It was as if she was in a completely different ballet. Every time she appeared on stage everything changed, the entire work lifted, and suddenly I felt as if I were seeing into someone's soul. I forgot all the intellectual buzzing in my head (I'm sure you're not actually supposed to be sitting there silently debating with yourself whether ballet is a dated art form or whether it has always looked this bloody stupid) and became lost in the elegance and dramatic subtleties of her performance. Suddenly it all made sense, she was the embodiment of all the narrative potential of dance, the way in which, like music, it can give you insights into the personal, emotional spaces which ordinary words and gesture can't. She was glorious, she was beautiful. And then her scene would be over and off she'd go, and on would gallumph a bunch of Renaissance peasants doing a drama school version of "now we are brawling in the streets!"

File under disappointing work by allegedly great masters that I have wasted time and money on at the Barbican.