‘You very rarely see men moving together like this’: Matthew Bourne on 30 years of his radical Swan Lake

The choreographer Matthew Bourne rehearses his company in a studio in east London, a building instantly recognisable as the home of the BBC’s MasterChef. To reach it from the nearest station, you cross a thundering dual carriageway via a dank tunnel, and then follow the road past a branch of Tesco until you reach a bridge that takes you over a creek (the studio was once a water mill). When I first see it, this bridge strikes me as perfectly ordinary; in the water below, an Evian bottle bobs, disconsolately. But in the future, I will always think of this spot as a threshold, a portal to enchantment. On one side, heavy traffic and stray supermarket trolleys. On the other, the uncommonly strange spell cast by 30 young men in old T-shirts and baggy shorts leaping ever skywards.

Inside, I watch this group dance for an hour, barely able to look away long enough to write in my notebook. The sight of them would, I think, be remarkable in any circumstances. Their boyish, mismatched kit only makes their movements seem the more tenderly expressive, and by doing so, wreaks havoc on the heart (mine feels like a steak that has been violently tenderised). But there are other things going on here, too. These men are the stars of the latest revival of Bourne’s Swan Lake, a show that not only changed the face of British dance – the swans, always danced by women in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, are famously performed by men in his version – but which has been in the world since before most of them were born (the new production, which runs into next year, marks its 30th birthday).

This Swan Lake is often why they dreamed of dancing in the first place – perhaps they saw the film Billy Elliot, whose final scene features it – and to be cast means everything. Lez Brotherston, Bourne’s longtime collaborator and the piece’s designer, says that some dancers cry the first time they put on their feathered swan legs, and when I hear Bourne tell them in a break that their performances are “a little lacking in character”, I see no slumping of shoulders. Their commitment is absolute, an almost tangible thing. Even as they pull on their sweatshirts, every face is turned towards him.

Does he really think they’re lacking in character? I ask him afterwards. I thought they were perfect! “Well, they’ve got a lot on their plate,” he says (Bourne, who is now a 64-year-old knight of the realm with countless hits behind him – including adaptations of Edward Scissorhands, The Red Shoes and Patrick Hamilton’s novel The Midnight Bell – is warm and generous, but at this point he’s not exactly smiling). “The principals started three weeks ago, and the rest two weeks ago. The work is intense at the moment. They’ve got so much information coming at them every day, their brains are frazzled. You have to be encouraging, but you also have to point out what’s not there.” Where would he say they are on a scale of one to 10? “A seven, though that number would be different for different people.” He asks me if I noticed that Harrison Dowzell, who’s dancing the Swan/the Stranger, was wearing trainers, as opposed to bare feet – which unnerves me because, in truth, I hardly did. “He’s got a badly stubbed toe that needs protection, so he has danced the whole rehearsal period in shoes so far – which isn’t great.”

Bourne is looking forward to unveiling this production. It’s six years since it was last staged; new talent takes it forward. But it’s fascinating, too, to see it in a new context, the wider culture having shifted. “The thing that’s interesting about this version of Swan Lake, with two men dancing together in what seems like a romantic relationship [in Bourne’s version of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, the Prince falls in love with one of the male swans, and they dance an ardent pas de deux], is that when we first did it, there were people walking out – not a lot, but they did. But there was also something that was very acceptable to [other audience members]. It was a man and a swan, and perhaps that took the edge off it.” In a way, he’s surprised it didn’t change things in dance more: “Of course everyone’s doing it now: two men have danced on Strictly. But in ballet, it has happened for the first time only recently, in Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar [which had its premiere in Melbourne last September]. He was very kind in an interview, referencing me as the pioneer, but he was the first to do it in ballet. We’re not a ballet company.” New Adventures is, he says “a dance theatre company”.

It strikes me that in 2024, the erotic component of Bourne’s Swan Lake is less significant than the fact that male violence against women is on the rise: it’s moving simply to see men being so tender, so gentle (though his swans are also capable of violence). “Yes,” he says. “I know exactly what you mean, and I think that has been very appealing to audiences across the years, and it was one of my intentions: to have men move lyrically, as well as powerfully. You very rarely see men moving together like that.”

But for all that Swan Lake continues to seem radical, albeit perhaps for different reasons now, his first impulse was, he insists, pretty straightforward. He’d got to the point where he’d seen Swan Lake on stage so many times, he was able to daydream a bit as he watched it. “And I just wondered: why are the swans female? There are male swans out there, after all.” When the opportunity to have a go at it came his way – his take on The Nutcracker for Opera North had gone well – he decided to go for broke: “We were a small, quirky company of six dancers then. We were upstarts, and we had nothing to lose.” He knew very well it might bomb. What he didn’t predict, even in his wildest dreams, was that queues would soon be snaking round the block outside Sadler’s Wells, where it opened; that it would win every award going (more than 30 of them, including three Tonys); that it would go on to become the longest-running full-length dance classic in the West End and on Broadway.

What was the first night like? “I was terrified, really terrified. It was one of those times where you feel your legs are going to buckle. I couldn’t speak. It was packed and everywhere I looked there was a famous face from the world of dance … ” The audience, he says, was unprepared for what was ahead – and therein lay an important part of its success. “Nobody could imagine what a male swan looked like. I think they all thought they were going to come on in tutus. When Adam [Cooper, who danced the Swan/the Stranger] made his first entrance, and you saw a swan … they weren’t ready for it. I think we could have done anything after that, and they would have gone with it. They were so excited by it: the scariness, and the beauty. It was the shock of the new, and that wasn’t what I was expecting. And then, in the interval, they went out and talked to one another, and they decided they liked it, you could sense that.”

Really, though, he can’t remember anything much beyond the moment in the interval when the producer Cameron Mackintosh pinned him against a wall and said: “This has to be in the West End.”

Cut to the next morning. A couple of the older critics – notably Clement Crisp of the Financial Times – had an attack of the vapours (Crisp maintained his loathing of Bourne’s work thereafter, insisting that he couldn’t take him seriously thanks largely to his “unerring sense of what the public wants”, and that he was tired of his turning masterpieces upside down and “shaking them to see what falls out of their pockets”).

***

Successful creative endeavours require alchemy. Some things are highly deliberate, others almost accidental. Adam Cooper wasn’t, perhaps, the obvious choice to dance the Swan/the Stranger at the time; he was a principal at the Royal Ballet, while Bourne’s background was in contemporary dance (he trained at the rather late age of 22, at what was then the Laban Dance Centre in south London). When Bourne went to ask Anthony Dowell, the Royal Ballet’s artistic director, if Cooper might be allowed a sabbatical to perform Swan Lake, Dowell was rather withering (though he said yes). “He said: so you want Adam to be the swan? Yes, I said. There was a long pause. Is there still a prince? he said. Yes, I said – and he went: Oh dear!” But it was worth being withered at: Cooper was crucial. “He was this thoroughbred, a creature from another planet. He made me take the role very seriously. I was always thinking of him, because I wanted to justify his decision to join us. If it had failed, it would have affected his career more than mine.”

• The first version of Swan Lake premiered on 4 March 1877 at the Bolshoi theatre in Moscow, with music by Tchaikovsky and choreography by the Czech Julius Reisinger, who was ballet master at the time. It was not a success.

• The production that led to the ballet’s worldwide fame and made it one of the most performed works in the repertory premiered on 27 January 1895 at St Petersburg’s Mariinsky theatre. Acts one and three were choreographed by Marius Petipa, while the “white” acts were the work of his deputy Lev Ivanov. The music was revised after Tchaikovsky’s death. (Matthew Bourne’s version reverts to the 1877 score.)

• The basic plot concerns unhappy Prince Siegfried, who falls in love with a swan maiden Odette, a princess under the power of the evil magician Von Rothbart, seen in the shape of an owl. He tricks Siegfried into swearing eternal love for his daughter Odile, the glittering black swan, and tragedy ensues.

• The complete Petipa/Ivanov Swan Lake was not seen in the west until Nicholas Sergeyev’s 1934 staging for Ninette de Valois’ Vic-Wells Ballet in London, later the Royal Ballet. He had been notator for the Mariinsky and based the production on the detailed notebooks he smuggled out of Russia after the revolution. Alicia Markova danced Odette/Odile.

• Alternative versions include a radical reimagining by Peter Darrell for Scottish Ballet in 1977 that conceived the swan scenes as an opium-induced dream; Illusions: Like Swan Lake ( 1976) by John Neumeier for Hamburg Ballet, which twists the story of “mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria and his fascination with swans into the plot; and Mats Ek’s version for the Swedish Cullberg Ballet (1987) featuring both male and female swans and centring on an oedipal prince and his inability to live happily ever after with a real woman (Odile) rather than a fantasy (Odette).

Sarah Crompton

“It was a huge risk,” says Cooper, when I talk to him online (he’s in Germany, directing The Pirates of Penzance). “I remember the first time he told me he wanted me to play the lead swan. I thought he was just reversing everybody, so when he said there’d still be a prince [as opposed to a princess], I wasn’t sure. How’s that going to work? I thought. Two men working together? I had a colleague at the Royal Ballet who came up to me and said, ‘How dare you be a part of this? I hope you know what you’re doing.’ Some people thought of me as a bit of a Judas, doing something so anti-ballet. But of course, it’s not anti-ballet. It celebrates the ballet, but in its own way.” Before the opening night, he was nervous of the audience. “Are they going to stand up and walk out?” But in the event, what he felt mostly was relief. “I could hear that people were loving it, but I was so overwhelmed, it didn’t sink in until later, when it kept happening. The [noisy] curtain call, the queues. Oh my God, I thought. It’s something else completely.”

There was a price to pay. In those days, Bourne had only one cast (now he has two, so dancers can rest). Cooper says that the part of the lead Swan involves “huge stamina … it’s an absolute killer because the choreography means you use every single part of your body, all the time.” Quite soon, his body was so overworked, he broke his foot. But the upsides were by far more important than the downsides: the chance to perform in the West End; the recognition of the new audiences it brought to dance. And of course, he had originated the role, so there was a feeling, not of ownership precisely, but perhaps of pride. “Historically, ballet directors are these men with sticks, shouting, doing the counts. Matthew’s not like that at all. He has a vision, but within that, he’s interested in other people’s ideas. He’ll always say, ‘What do you think?’”

Isabel Mortimer, who danced the Queen in the first production, echoes all of this (her background, unlike Cooper’s, was in contemporary dance; I meet her in London). “What’s amazing about Matthew is that he can see things in people; he focuses on what you can do, not on what you can’t. He’s a curator as much as a choreographer. You can contribute.” In rehearsal for Swan Lake, she tells me, the cast was in a bubble. “It was only when some people started saying he shouldn’t be allowed to touch this iconic piece that we became aware of what the first night might be like”

Like Cooper, the strain would eventually tell on her body; it’s unheard of for ballerinas to dance as many performances she did then: “We had to cut whole dances [when people were injured] because we didn’t have covers!” But in the end, she did it for 10 years, on and off. “It was life-changing,” she says. “I coach dancers now, and one of the things I talk about is mastery, which is to do with flow, not adrenaline. It was Swan Lake that taught me about flow. My mind would blank out, but my body would do what it needed to.”

The last person in my Swan Lake jigsaw is Lez Brotherston, Bourne’s longtime set and costume designer – and talking to him is great. Creative people sometimes struggle to explain their work to outsiders, but Brotherston is like Bourne: both of them talk easily about what they do, without snobbery (I can’t help but connect this with the fact that Bourne thinks of himself as a storyteller who cares deeply about the experience of the audience). It is impossible now to imagine Swan Lake without Brotherston’s costumes – a pair of swan legs is on permanent display in the V&A. But like everything else to do with the production, at the time, his head was mostly full of questions. “The first was: why men? Matthew said, well, swans are feral. So then I thought, OK, we’re talking masculine swans, so they’ll certainly be topless, and I’m assuming that bare feet is better than a jazz shoe. So then it was a case of: what kind of shorts are they wearing? Matthew had a picture of an Indian dancer in trousers that had bits of fringe on it, so I did a prototype along those lines, trousers with raggedy bits on them. In the end, the raggedy bits were silk, because when you wash it, it sort of goes like dreadlocks.”

Brotherston oversees every new production involving his designs, “which is rare … I mean, I did Seven Deadly Sins with Martha Wainwright at the Royal Opera House in 2007, and when they revived it, the first I knew about it was an invite to a dress rehearsal.” It can be dispiriting, bringing the Swan Lake costumes out: they’re beaten up, ripped and mouldy. But 60 pairs of fresh legs have just been delivered, a moment he always finds peculiarly humbling: “Gosh, I think: a drawing that probably took me half-an-hour to do … and putting them on is a rite of passage for the dancers.” As a young designer, he used to say he would know he had truly made it if he ever saw someone in fancy dress who’d chosen one of his designs, à la The Rocky Horror Show. “And then it happened. I walked into a bar in New York. It had lots of photographs of its customers, and it had a Halloween night, and there were two guys dressed as swans. I was by myself having a drink. No one knew who I was. But I was so happy – my swans had made it.”

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake: The Next Generation tours from 11 November until 7 June 2025. It is at Sadler’s Wells, London, from 3 December to 26 January