Romeo and Juliet

The Australian Ballet
Tuesday 11th October, 2022
State Theatre

Choreography: John Cranko
Composer: Sergei Prokofiev
Guest Repetituer and Stager: Yseult Lendvai
Costume and Set design: Jürgen Rose
Lighting design: Jon Buswell
Guest Repetituer: Mark Kay

With Opera Australia Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria

Romeo: Joseph Caley
Juliet: Benedicte Bemet
Tybalt: Jake Mangakahia
Mercutio: Marcus Morelli
Benvolio: Cameron Holmes
Lord Paris: Nathan Brook
Lord Capulet: Andrew Murphy
Lady Capulet: Jacqueline Clark
The Duke of Verona/Friar Laurence: Stephen Baynes
Juliet’s Nurse: Terese Power
Carnival Dancers, Court Attendants, Citizens of Verona: Artists of The Australian Ballet

Concertmaster: Sulki Yu
Conductor: Jonathan Lo

Language of Love, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet, drawn up especially for Fjord Review, shared here for those of you who missed the livestream or couldn’t make it to a Melbourne performance, or perhaps wish to revisit the opulence of the Capulets’ ball. Romeo and Juliet opens in Sydney on the 1st of December, 2022.

A lot can happen in a handful of days. You can find your Romeo or Juliet. Make a declaration of eternal love. You can be impetuous for nightfall. You can be drawn into a portentous duel in a market place. You can come up against history and a family feud that has little to do with you. You can be sentenced to exile. You can be grief-stricken. It can all end in the Capulet Family Crypt.

Shakespeare compressed months into days, and John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet compresses time further, into 154 minutes with two intervals. To Shakespeare’s ‘double time’[i], Cranko winds the clock faster still, and so, after a pause of nineteen years on the stage, The Australian Ballet present’s Romeo and Juliet at the State Theatre, Melbourne, with all the joyous, “breathless rapidity of incidents”[ii] you’d expect. Such haste on the stage, then and now.

Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet premiered in the same year that Peggy van Praagh founded The Australian Ballet in 1962. The company first performed Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet in 1974, and Jürgen Rose’s all things bright and dim set design reflects the contrast between light and dark, day and night, that is entwined in the classic tale. Cranko’s swirling and gridded clusters of people in large gatherings from Market Place to Ballroom are shown in contrast with the intimacy and ultimate tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, making the stolen moments they share together all the more tender and urgent. The unusual frequency of events in Romeo and Juliet makes it ripe for dance: everything is moving and everything is movement.

This restaging, rounding out the 2022 season with all the longed-for lyrical contrast, with Principal Benedicte Bemet as Juliet to Principal Joseph Caley, who joined The Australian Ballet this year from English National Ballet, as her Romeo. Together, Bemet and Caley wholeheartedly embody the light quickness of their roles presented in contrast to the slower pace the society they are bound by operates.

From their first pas de deux in the Ballroom, they are magnetically drawn to each other. When Bemet’s Juliet dances with Romeo beneath her balcony, before the close of the first Act, Prokofiev’s magnificent score is like the fast heartbeat. It is suffused in Bemet’s impossibly nimble flickering feet. It is in every facet of the choreography, that rush of emotions, building upon the inquisitive ‘I like you, I really like you’ of their first pas de deux. It is a flutter, like the feelings in the heart. It is young love; new love; a spark that has settled and is burning. And it sweeps me along, as Juliet runs backwards and gently falls, safe in the knowledge that in this game of trust Romeo will catch her. And he does, again and again, without fail. This playful exploration of aching gestures is beautiful to behold. To recall, perhaps. To dream, all. Romeo sweeps her off her feet, literally, in a series of lifts that tip her, like love, upside down. And Juliet, too, sweeps Romeo off his feet, and shakes all memory of Rosaline from his mind. Their reluctance to part echoed by the violin.

With a two-tiered set that serves as an infamous balcony, a bridge, a loggia overlooking an open count, and the entrance to the family crypt, there is so much to see that it is impossible to take in the whole ensemble picture. And this pictorial framing, for me, intensifies the feeling of speeding headlong towards devastation. From the background colour of fruit being tossed in a brawl, to the exuberant rubbery tumble of carnival figures, led by Soloist Brodie James, in my own version of the ruin of impulsiveness that runs through Romeo and Juliet, I try, and fail, to take in all of the details. From neat formations that depict the rule of the family to the compositional asymmetry which signals Mercutio’s fate, Cranko’s choreography brings to life the numerous metaphors of time and fate woven in the source material. As the portents of death in Prokofiev’s score thematically build through repetition of melody and rhythm, under Conductor Jonathan Lo, to convey emotional intensity, Cranko interrupts the structure of formal groupings at the crescendo with an off-centre tragedy.

Senior Artist Marcus Morelli’s Mercutio, seeing that one day can be the difference between life and death — “ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man”[iii] — gives one of the finer lengthy death dances. He straddles playful nonchalance and the realisation of what has transpired in a marvellous ‘all eyes on me’ before lights out finale. As Music Director and Chief Conductor Nicolette Fraillon describes, “The death of Mercutio is heartbreaking — you can hear his theme peter out as he dies, you can hear his heart slow and stop.”[iv]

Things do not end in Friar Laurence’s garden of glorious fecundity and evenly spaced trees, but in the Capulet Family Crypt amidst a snare drum culmination and the tolling of the death knell that could be heard rumbling in the distance before Act I even began. Just as the themes are transfigured in the score, so too Romeo and Juliet upon the stage. Reshaped, in defiance of the stars.

“Eyes, look your last” for it may be another nineteen-year respite.

[i] Raymond Chapman, ‘Double Time in Romeo and Juliet’, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Jul., 1949), pp. 372–374, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3717655, accessed 12th October, 2022.

[ii] William Watkiss Lloyd, ‘Essays on the life and plays of Shakespeare’ (London: C. Whittingham, 1958), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.319510022970636, , accessed 12th October, 2022.

[iii] Shakespeare quote referenced by Emma Torrance, ‘Character analysis: Benvolio, Mercutio and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet’, British Library, May 19, 2017, https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/character-analysis-benvolio-mercutio-and-tybalt-in-romeo-and-juliet, accessed 12th October, 2022.

[iv] Nicolette Fraillon, in interview with Rose Mulready, ‘A Pas de Deux with Stalin’, The Australian Ballet Melbourne Romeo and Juliet programme, p. 32.

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Image credit: Artists of The Australian Ballet in John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet, by Jeff Busby