Props: Prince’s Bed
Appearing in: “Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake”
Some 10 years ago, British director and choreographer Matthew Bourne had an iconoclastic idea: Why not create a “Swan Lake” without the fairy tale setting and female dancers?
He staged a production of the ballet that depicted a dysfunctional royal family in 1960s London, with bare-chested men dancing the swan roles. To do this, he sat down with costume and set designer Lez Brotherston to craft the visual aspects of this non-traditional staging.
They decided the prince–who first appears as a boy neglected by his mother–needed an unusual bed. “We thought that a good way to show his isolation was to put him in a bed so that he felt very, very small,” says Brotherston. He designed a white bed and decorated the headboard with an oversized gold-relief crown.
But the bed also has a hidden feature. At the end of the ballet, when the troubled prince is seen once again on his bed, Bourne wanted the main swan to mysteriously appear before him. “Since we would be traveling we couldn’t cut a trap door in the stage floor of every theater,” Brotherston notes. So he had a trap door cut into the mattress, which is several feet off the floor and covered with linens that drape down the sides.
Out of audience view, the swan passes through a hole in the wall behind the headboard, goes under the bed–and then emerges from the sheets.
Later, a flock of swans comes out from under the bed and attacks the main swan, who disappears through the same trap door. “In the resolution, we see the young prince in the arms of the swan in a mirror above the bed,” says Brotherston, who won a 1999 Tony Award after the work played in New York.
“A lot of people see it as a gay relationship,” he added, “but I’ve always seen the swan, who is free and can do what it wants, as the symbol of what the prince would like to be.”
———-
“Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake,” through Sunday, Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St., $15-$72.50; 312-902-1400.
