Graeme Murphy Choreographs a New Romeo and Juliet for the Australian Ballet

Adam Bull as Romeo and Lana Jones as Juliet in Graeme Murphy's Romeo & Juliet. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Romeo & Juliet
Sydney Opera House, Opera Theatre: 7 December 2011, 1.30 pm
continues in Sydney until 21 December

Choreography - Graeme Murphy
Creative associate - Janet Vernon
Music - Sergei Prokofiev
Costume design - Akira Isogawa
Set design - Gerard Manion
Lighting design - Damien Cooper
Projection design - Jason Lam

Conductor - Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo
The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra

Juliet - Leanne Stojmenov
Romeo - Daniel Gaudiello
Mercutio - Yosvani Ramos
Tybalt - Chengwu Guo
Benvolio - Calvin Hannaford
Lord Capulet - Damien Welch
Lady Capulet - Rachel Rawlins
Lord Montague - John-Paul Idaszak
Lady Montague - Alice Topp
Prince of Darkness - Andrew Wright
Prince of Peace - Garry Stocks
Nurse - Elizabeth Hill
Paris - Ben Davis
Holy Man - Jarryd Madden

William Shakespeare, though he did not of course invent all his stories, rather drawing them from history or myth, makes them seem like his in his vivid tellings. His characters gain real personalities by virtue of the dense poetry but also from their actions and behavior in the plays and the strong linkages of cause, motivation, effect, imagery and expressive action from foot to foot, line to line, scene to scene and act to act give the plays strong coherence through the internal logics, whether ‘real’, poetical, linguistic or dramatic. In a phrase, he had a sense of theater, he magically created real worlds, not just existing in his private imagination, but in seemingly solid words and acting which create in the theater believable atmospheres of battle, or forest serene or sinister, or anything else from any part of the world. Perhaps most of all the stories we grant Shakespeare possession of that of Romeo and Juliet. Ballet has a history of borrowing Shakespeare’s pieces, though it may seem self-defeating to leave the Bard’s words and take only the story, many are successful as theater in their own right, perhaps because they avoid a direct translation into mime and movement rather taking across the essence of their drama and characters. Of the plays, Romeo and Juliet is maybe the most often transferred to the ballet, with such a myriad of versions in the 20th Century, starting with the 1926 Diaghilev-Kochno version with choreography by Nijinska, music by Constant Lambert, featuring Karsavina and Lifar, then the 1940 Prokofiev-Lavrovsky Kirov version with Galina Ulanova, which was revived and reinterpreted after the war, brought to the West, filmed and performed many times. Frederick Ashton choreographed his own version with the Prokofiev score in 1955, as did John Cranko in 1958, Kenneth Macmillan in 1965, Rudi von Dantzig in Amsterdam in 1967, Birgit Cullberg in Stockholm in 1969, Oleg Vinogradov in Leningrad in 1973, , and many more since then. Antony Tudor choreographed a one act version to music by Delius in New York in 1943 and Maurice Béjart choreographed a version to Berlioz’ music in 1966, which is said to be pacifist in spirit and sympathetic to the attitude of the soon-to-be 1968 protests.[1] Is it any wonder the balletic Romeo and Juliet is a phenomenon of the 20th (and 21st) Century, following on each of the bloodiest wars? Not enough seem to be listening and we certainly are overdue for some pacifism now. With that impressive list of famous 20th Century choreographers, it has come to the point that it is the ballet all choreographers seem to have to attempt, as the role of Giselle is to ballerinas, and given all that plus the memory of Shakespeare’s poetry, expectations are extremely high.