David Dougill fails to fall in love with the Bolshoi’s Romeo and Juliet

The Bolshoi Ballet’s new Romeo and Juliet, which shifted their Covent Garden season into a different gear last week, is the most radical departure imaginable from the company’s classical image, an utter contrast to their time-hallowed Lavrovsky staging of Prokofiev’s ballet.

This is the Bolshoi daring to go modern — that is, modern dance in modern dress. Yet the production, for all its boldness, manages to feel oddly old-fashioned, at least partly because the Moscow troupe, long entrenched in traditional ways, has been left behind by decades of dance experimentation in the West and so has some catching up to do.

What is innovative is that this Romeo and Juliet is the brainchild of the British theatre director Declan Donnellan, famous in Russia. The Bolshoi invited him to direct an opera; instead, he proposed a ballet (his first), choosing Romeo and Juliet because he had loved it from his teens. So the theatrical ideas are his, but Donnellan is not a choreographer. This role was given to the Moldovan Radu Poklitaru, and his contribution is disappointingly unmemorable, as well as being heavily derivative of the style of Sweden’s Mats Ek.

Donnellan’s expressionist dance- drama, premiered last December, has a stark, minimalist decor by Nicholas Ormerod: slatted streaked walls and moveable blocks, sometimes lit blood red. Donnellan and Poklitaru use the corps de ballet as blocks, too — an anonymous chorus, or indeed chorus line, much given to mad gallivanting or silhouetted friezes. Goodness knows why, at a particularly unsuitable moment, they rush on dressed as toy soldiers from The Nutcracker, to the music of the mandolin dance, and then run off again screaming.

Prokofiev’s music (meatily played under Pavel Klinichev) is much edited to suit Donnellan’s treatment, sometimes perversely. The plot is pared down, too; sometimes, but not always, beneficially. Donnellan may be acute in his references to the play’s themes, but ballet works differently from spoken theatre. His best idea is to have the lovers tugged away from each other by opposing ensembles of the men and the women, while they strain for contact. This is the balcony scene (with conceptual balcony), a far cry from the usual big pas de deux.

Maria Alexandrova and Denis Savin dance the couple with searing commitment and raw power. I could wish that Poklitaru didn’t overuse a motif of shivering, twitching and dithering at moments of crisis, and their contorted grapplings in the bedroom duet — she pumping her foot on his abdomen, or bicycling her legs in the air — verge on the ludicrous. Other characters are sketchy, though vigorously deployed. Yuri Klevtsov has fun as Mercutio, got up in drag as Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot to attract the advances of a deluded Tybalt (wiry Denis Medvedev). Ilze Liepa’s glamorous Lady Capulet wears bright green with an extravagant hat. I found this Romeo and Juliet an up-and-down ride, but it won a big reception on Monday, and the company danced all-out in a new challenge that they clearly relished.

Earlier, in Swan Lake (which returns this week), the Bolshoi were back on classical territory, with the corps de ballet ravishing as swans, and Svetlana Zakharova beautiful, a rare vision of perfection, as Odette. This production, by the former Bolshoi supremo Yuri Grigorovich, originated in 1969, but was revised in 2001.

It puts Prince Siegfried (the elegant and strong, if soft-focused, Andrei Uvarov in the cast I saw) at the centre of a psychological treatment — a man besieged by his imaginings, with an Evil Genius representing his fateful destiny. A new ending, in which Siegfried is left sorrowing alone, fits Grigorovich’s theme, but involves musical vandalism to Tchaikovsky’s great climax. This is to nobody’s credit. Still, the two-act reworking moves with pace, and in Simon Virsaladze’s handsome gothic designs, it makes a rich spectacle.