As the pages of StageTalk Magazine will testify, I do like contemporary ballet and go out of my way to see it. One great omission was that I had never seen Matthew Bourne’s company but last night at the Bristol Hippodrome all came right with the world when I saw their seminal interpretation on Swan Lake.

Most modern ballet is usually set to contemporary music or to a nice bit of Chopin perhaps. What makes Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake so astounding is that it danced to Tchaikovsky’s original score in a way that almost defies belief. Now, as I have said before on these pages, I am not a great classical ballet fan. Swan Lake, in particular, I find too twee, too schmaltzy, too insipid almost; both music and choreography. What Bourne manages to do is not only re-define the ballet but make you listen to the music again with fresh ears. It seems much bolder, more aggressive if you are not watching pretty girls gliding across the stage on pointe.

Matthew Bourne boldly takes Swan Lake where it has never gone before. During the interval I overheard a little girl complaining to her mother, “But you said it was going to be ballet.” Oh, it is ballet Jim, but not as we know it. There were no pink tutus, no pointe shoes nor any well-filled, smooth white tights in sight.

So, what makes this Swan Lake different? Daft question – everything about Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is different. This is Swan Lake turned on its head and given a jolly good shake. For a start, all the swans are men and the first couple of acts are played, very successfully, for laughs. This is a world of glitz, glitter and paparazzi where the girls are sometimes bold, brassy, Friday-night gauche good-timers, sometimes evil, seductive, eye-patched vamps. This is Swan Lake where characters talk on mobile phones and dance the Twist in nightclubs to Tchaikovsky’s hallowed bars (bars/nightclub, geddit?). There are lots of little aside jokes which I loved – the little old lady with headscarf and shopping trolley who wanders on and starts tossing bits of bread into the lake for the swans. I smiled at the night club called Swank with a poster for Swan Vesta matches on the wall outside and much, much more.

But there was a lot of real drama too. The lakeside scene was straight out of a Hammer Horror film with the moonbeams playing through the overhanging branches on to the chapel walls. The swans, being male, certainly created a frisson and a tension you would not normally associate with the piece. These were not the pure, graceful creatures that we know and love. These were the swans of nightmare, flocking like vultures on the prince’s bed, emerging from under and in it. These were Alfred Hitchcock’s birds that’d peck your eyes out as soon as look at you.

Now in its eighteenth year, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake still excites and overwhelms though such a rich concoction it is sometime hard to digest. If your idea of Swan Lake is Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, you are in for a shock, not least from the homo-erotic pas de deux with the prince and a male swan. If you like bold, innovative, jaw-droppingly good dance and theatre then this certainly is for you. I can’t believe how I missed Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake for so long but I’m certainly glad I’ve found it now. Unbelievable, literally.     ★★★★★   Michael Hasted