Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera house; what could be more perfect? I forget how wonderful ballet is as a performance medium and I find it a lot more accessible than opera. With opera, either you understand the language and story, or you are watching the translated subtitles at the side of the stage and missing the action. With ballet, no words are needed: everything is told through the action and you can just watch and enjoy. When you stop and think about it, it’s really rather clever.
And this production was brilliant. The emotion, the acting, and of course the dancing, were all exquisite. Ryoichi Hirano and Beatriz Stix-Brunell were playing Romeo and Juliet, and they had such chemistry. I was in tears during the final scene, as were many around me, because their emotion was so raw. Romeo dancing with a lifeless Juliet must be one of the hardest pas de deux for both dancers, and it was heartbreaking to watch.
Tickets for the ROH are not cheap, so this production (and obviously others!) could be considered painfully inaccessible to a lot of people, which is a real shame when we want to encourage people to explore the performance mediums and to support the performing arts. However, it is great that the ROH is going to be live broadcasting the ballet to cinemas in June, and I wish that more shows would do this! This production is so good that I might just find my closest cinema to watch it again…