These Violent Delights review – Scottish Ballet’s feverish Romeo and Juliet is bold and unsettling

Scottish Ballet, under the direction of Christopher Hampson and Oscar Sansom, gives us an engrossing dance riff on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The title alludes to Friar Lawrence saying, at the couple’s secret wedding ceremony, that “these violent delights have violent ends”, that their passion will consume itself in the act of marriage – which is true, but not in the way he thinks.

The ballet is fierce, athletic, knotty and sensual; it is not a filmed event beneath a proscenium arch but a film that inhabits its own theatrical space. The whole event is a radically impressionistic compression of the play’s action, bringing it down to just 70 minutes, an extended nightmarish dream sequence with a repeated and disturbing scene of Juliet being dragged across the grass by an unseen force. This version chucks out, among other things, the balcony scene, and it interestingly modifies the ending, suggesting that the double-suicide might not be a trick that goes wrong but an anguished mutual gesture of despair.

Intriguingly, it is only really at the end that Romeo (Ishan Mahabir-Stokes) and Juliet (Kayla-Maree Tarantolo) have much time together alone. From the beginning, we see Juliet, frustrated and lonely within her family who are trying to marry her off to the milksop Paris; at one point Paris (Yuri Marques) and Lord Capulet (Christopher Akrill) make her do a bizarre kind of abusive “trust exercise” movement between the two of them. Her nurse (Grace Horler), incidentally, is dressed in the uniform of an NHS-style nurse, as if getting ready to put Juliet in the psych ward if she defies her parents’ wishes.

In her mind, at the outset, she haunts the life of Romeo, as if in a kind of choreographed trance, as he spends parallel time with his family. She has predicted that this is the man who destiny has in store for her. The party scene where they are to meet is held at a club ominously called the Apothecary, and the dance hums with nervous energy and MDMA excitement, but the ballet never permits any simply euphoric private moments of pure love for the star-crossed leads. They are always entangled with other people, vibrating with suspicion, confronting the future that is crowding in on them.

This is a reading of Romeo and Juliet that is all about the alienation of love and the brevity of youth: a dark and pessimistic reading, in its way, but performed with vehement commitment and style.