The Brooklyn Rail

The curtain rises on a cold and sterile space. A curved white tiled wall encloses the stage area, dwarfed only by a high wire fence that marks the perimeter of the “Verona Institute.” Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet relocates the Prokofiev ballet to an ambiguous and dispassionate center, where the young characters, dressed in white (are they inmates, patients, or prisoners?), are policed, drugged, and made to march with rigid limbs to the ballet’s most famous movement, the “Dance of the Knights.” How does Bourne—who is perhaps most known for his overtly gay Swan Lake (1995), which recast the swans with shirtless male dancers—continue to disperse queerness within this harsh and unforgiving regime of the clinic? How can a story of heterosexual love be read as one of transgender desire? A defiant yearning that survives the deadly methods to restrain and violate trans life enacted by our institutions today?

Bourne takes every opportunity to embrace the queerness of Shakespeare’s characters. Mercutio is given a boyfriend in Balthasar, who together mockingly strip and kiss their new inmate Romeo, as a teasing welcome when he first enters the institution. At the party (the masked ball of Shakespeare’s original where Romeo and Juliet meet), a disco ball descends and the teenagers—dressed in a colorful assemblage of bow ties, blazers, ribbons, cummerbunds, and patterned frocks that form their party attire—file into the space from their two respective entrances: a door marked “Girls,” and another marked “Boys.” At first, the Reverend (the Friar) and institute guard (who’s plot line vaguely echoes that of Tybalt) oversee that gender roles are strictly maintained. However, as these adult authorities leave, the party soon becomes a riot of adolescent desire; the characters swap partners, oscillating between those of the same and opposite sex. Mercutio swishes his kilt like a skirt in a kind of sissy dance, while couples straddle each other on the floor and writhe against the walls. It is a cacophony of queer possibility made possible only when those who enforce the law are absent. Bourne’s masquerade ball unleashes the potential slippage within gender’s masquerading performativity. When the guard later returns, the party, of course, is over.

In this Romeo and Juliet, we do not find two feuding families, but a clinic where gender is segregated, and sexuality policed. What makes Bourne’s critique of such institutional control astute is the inclusion of the multiple idiosyncrasies that underpin societal attempts to govern sex. While the guard, who wears a police style uniform, repeatedly separates the genders and forbids all sexual contact, he also makes sexual advances toward a terrified Juliet, demanding she join him in a private room where it seems he has been assaulting her. When the teenagers engage in cross-gender play, he reprimands them physically; but when he himself is later provoked and mocked, he retaliates by physically forcing two of the boys to kiss. This latter instance traces the contradictory intertwining of homosexual desire and homophobic violence under patriarchal authority.

The production was first staged in 2019, and this year’s revival includes a trans/gender-nonconforming performer, Eve Ngbokota, in the invented transfeminine non-binary role of Lennox (the company’s first non-binary character). As Lennox enters the party with a bow in their hair and a lacy skirt, they are thrown down and forced to tuck it into their trousers. Meanwhile, their attempts to dance with a boy are halted. The inclusion of Lennox in Bourne’s “Verona Institute,” which spurs the arrival of trans possibility, recasts the clinic setting as a microcosm for the brutal regulation of queer and trans life and, in particular, trans children and adolescents, ubiquitous today within our medical systems. Last year’s announcement that NHS England would close the UK’s only gender identity clinic for children, at the Tavistock Centre in London, has marked a period when the life of trans and gender-nonconforming young people is increasingly marred, with access to medication distressingly limited and gatekept. Furthermore, Bourne’s own words that the “Verona Institute” represents a disciplinary center not from some antiquated past, but from “some point in the ‘not too distant’ future” make this production an urgent warning against an imminent and violent dystopia. This summer’s production at Sadler’s Wells in London, charged with the addition of Ngbokota’s Lennox, whose transness persists despite the guard’s threatening violence, has a pressing political valence for a city facing an ongoing crisis brought about by the impending closure of the Tavistock’s gender identity clinic. For a queer or queer-allied audience, the clinical setting of the “Verona Institute,” cannot be read without these unsettling connotations.

But how can we read trans queerness in the heterosexual narrative of Romeo and Juliet? An answer is possible if we read Romeo and Juliet as two differently gendered parts of a single individual, who’s story is not one of romantic pursuit but of desired transition and transgender possibility. What if Juliet is not Romeo’s love object, but the trans feminine identity he/she seeks? Many trans theorists, such as Cáel M. Keegan, have described how the fractured identity of trans experience can be read across two characters in films and media where no overt trans meaning is present.¹ Romantic yearning becomes transgender self-yearning; the prolonged quest to find each other in the final act of Bourne’s ballet may stage the meandering and difficult path of transgender identity. Moments of longed-for reconciliation could therefore act as representations of integration of a multi-gendered queer self, such as in their eventual pas de deux, the “Cell” duet, when their limbs entangle as if becoming one polymorphous being, or when they fuse in a kiss that Bourne hoped would be the “longest ever continuous kiss in dance history.”

When Romeo is committed to the clinic by his parents, it is clear his sexual oddity has failed to conform to their expectations. While his parents’ movements are straight and ordered, he cannot keep himself from climbing the walls and dancing about. Bourne (who’s repertoire includes Play Without Words [2002]) calls his choreography “wordless theater” and Romeo’s gestures speak to queer identity. Standing in front of the clinic’s doctors, he cups his hands over his mouth and, in a wriggling and erratic movement, tosses them outward before pulling them to his heart, and then down tightly over his genitals, bending his knees inwards in mock shame. What does such wordless expression say, other than voice an irrepressible sexuality? His hands that alternately cover genitals, mouth, and heart, gesture to the multiple locations of sexuality’s expression and repression. Later, when being banished from the clinic by a doctor, he begs to stay with Juliet and refuses to go. Laying on his chest in delight, he pushes his posterior upwards to his parent’s dismayed faces, in a position of wanton submission. Transgender children currently depend on the medical institution despite its violent regulatory power. If Juliet portrays Romeo’s trans analog, his refusal to leave suggests his willingness to suffer the excessive brutality of the “Verona Institute” in order to remain acquainted with a transgender self.

The guard’s sexual violation of Juliet can be further understood in this light. It is well known that, as many sources, including the recent documentary The Stroll, have shown, there is a history of transwomen sexworkers being procured or abused by the very police officers who arrest them. In Bourne’s reimagining of the play’s end, Juliet murders Romeo accidentally when overcome by trauma, stabbing him in the abdomen. Could this murder instead represent a suicide, where the trans entity, Juliet, having suffered too greatly, is driven to self-destruction, in the slaying of her counterpart? Could this be a pertinent reminder of the immense risk of suicide facing trans youth? As she steps back and wipes her bloody hands on the front of her white hospital gown, the resulting bloodstain mirrors that of Romeo’s mortal wound.

1. Cáel M. Keegan, “Revisitation: A Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image,” MedieKultur 61.1-5 (Fall 2016): 26-41.