Royal Swedish Ballet: Romeo and Juliet

Opera House Stockholm
May 24, 2025

Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet has been around since 1965 and Shakespeare’s play a great deal longer, but both are worth revisiting especially when the performances are of high quality. The Royal Swedish Ballet Saturday matinee in Stockholm, the second performance of the new run, featured Maya Schonbrun as Juliet who, to quote the bard, “doth teach the torches to burn bright” in a scintillating performance. The company rose to the occasion in bustling street scenes, ostentatious grand balls and thrilling fights, fully committed and well-rehearsed.

The central roles of Romeo and Juliet are coveted and hugely demanding in technique, dramatic ability and sheer stamina. Schonbrun delivered on all counts with beautifully placed feet, crystalline classical positions and a finely drawn reading of a complex, wilful Juliet. Her first meeting with Romeo marks a striking transition. They stand fixated as their world turns upside down. Then launching into her solo, her childlike body metamorphoses into a young woman of passion, her arm expansive, her torso with every fibre alive and tingling. It is a potent prelude to their meeting in the moonlight where their emotions take flight.

Gabriel Sinclair Jahnke as Romeo has a winning smile and is youthfully overeager to fall in love. His solo in the ballroom presents him with challenges he still needs to master but he has the jump and the passion to launch himself into MacMillan’s aerial choreography when he meets his Juliet alone in the garden. Together, he and Schonbrun created the magic at the heart of this turbulent drama.

Jahnke offered good support throughout in the demanding duets that highlight the ballet. Schonbrun’s fine-tuned musicality was used to excellent effect, giving MacMillan’s thrilling lifts a breathtaking spontaneity. The passion in the garden soared and its antithesis, Juliet’s despair at Romeo’s dawn departure gave a knife edge of pain to her desolation as she throws herself into his arms.

The male trio, when Jahnke is joined by Lorenzzo Fernandes as Mercutio and Zane Smith-Taylor as Benvolio created a surprisingly good blend of personalities. Fernandes was a strong presence from the outset, a favourite with the lively Harlots, using his quick wits and dance skills to defuse the rising tensions in the ballroom and moving to centre stage as he battles Tybalt and dies heroically.

Smith-Taylor’s Benvolio is so much more than just the third man. Still in the corps, he proved an exceptional dancer, with a pure classical line and technique that never wavered while keeping fully absorbed in the action and engaging with his two friends. The three made a neat comedy trio in their encounter with Nurse in the market square while the Mandolin dance, in costumes festooned with lively tassels and led by a turbo-charged Ryosuke Miwa, was an added bonus.

I relished Joăo Felipe Santana’s uncompromising Tybalt. His single-minded hatred defined every move and fuelled the fierceness of the fight scenes. The killing of Mercutio became a defining moment delivered with callous disregard. His own death was treated with similar insensitivity but gives Nadja Sellrup a cameo role as Lady Capulet, letting her hair down in an uncontrollably display of grief. Even monsters have their loved ones, and her pain sets the tone as the story descends into its darkest chapter.

The final act is a tour de force for Juliet. In a maelstrom of emotion she experiences first love, confronts and rejects family and societal values and conquers her fear of death. A dysfunctional family is revealed. Felicia Andersson, as the Nurse, the only one who knows that Juliet is married, given to Romeo and cannot marry Paris, hovers in desperation. Juliet’s mother is almost out of the frame. Lord Capulet tries to prove his authority in unfeeling brutality and Paris is way out of his depth. Juliet walks the path alone and Schonbrun is disarmingly honest in the depth of her feelings, knowing what must be done even to the final death blow. The audience were left stunned as the curtain descended. We were taken on a thrilling emotional journey, so well known but now new minted in a memorable performance.

Paul Andrews’ sets and costumes from the Birmingham Royal Ballet production, made an interesting change from the well-known, and rather heavy weight, Nicholas Georgiadis’s designs. Set in a similar period but given a lighter touch they work well. A small detail that also worked was Mercutio’s ochre coloured costume blending somewhat with the Capulet’s red in the ballroom to make him less obviously an intruder. However, the fairy-tale front cloth is totally out of place and really needs to get lost. It clashes horribly with the overture leading us into one of the most beautiful of ballet scores conducted with pace and clarity by Ewa Strusińska with the Royal Ballet Orchestra.

This review also appears on Dansportalen.