Stunning re-imagining of Shakespeare classic
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Matthew Bourne s Romeo + Juliet stars young dancers and brings in young audiences – Seen and Heard International
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Is it a prison? Is it an experimental hospital? Is it a borstal? We never really find out. The always excellent Lez Brotherson's stark white-tiled, metal-fenced set – aka the Verona Institute – sets Shakespeare's play in the right city but in a savagely different world. Choreographer Matthew Bourne has ditched the warring aristocratic families. These young people are fighting against and inside a repressive institution that divides the sexes and demands conformity and docility (with drugs and straitjackets, if necessary). Romeo (a touchingly gauche Paris Fitzpatrick) is dumped here by his ambitious politician parents, who want him out of the way and perhaps reformed into a more acceptable son who fits the mould. The mould inside the Institute is quickly established. The inmates, white uniformed, are put through their paces (to the Dance of the Knights) and the power of their repressed anger has them at times literally climbing the walls. The stage fizzes with the energy o