All-male Swan Lake makes ballet history

What: Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake Where: Sadler’s Wells, EC1

When: Until 26th January

Price: Various

Dance newbies: this is not frilly dresses and satin shoes. You will be exposed to raw power, unsettling emotions and unsettling scenes. Ballet aficionados: prepare to be amazed at the side of Swan Lake this performance brings out.

Set to Tchaikovsky’s music for Swan Lake, one of the most loved and most performed classical ballets, Matthew Bourne’s production created great controversy. And yet, 18 years from premiere, every tour sells out – a testament to its truly unique impact. The performance revolutionises Swan Lake as a performance, while sticking faithfully to the musical score.

At the centre of the dance, replacing the traditional figure of Odette, the fragile princess turned swan, is the Prince and the Swan. The former (Simon Williams) is timid, insecure and alone, the latter a powerful, vital, extraordinary creature, filled with mystery, masculinity and strength. Jonathan Ollivier brings an almost frightening power to this role, commanding the hearts and emotions of the Prince and the audience in a way rarely seen on stage.

Scorned by his frigid, fashionable mother, the Prince drifts through his royal duties, distracted and sorrowful. Escaping the strict, sterile geometry of his castle, he discovers passion, sexuality and life in a grimy bar downtown. This is when his life starts intertwining with the swans, creating scenes with an almost hallucinatory atmosphere, between reality and visions. Masculine, powerful, violent, hauntingly beautiful and utterly non-human, the swans appear repeatedly to the Prince. First hostile, then almost within reach, with the lead Swan by turns beckoning and aggressive.

This interpretation is inspired: the side of a swan we all know exists. Yes, swans are graceful and pretty, like the iconic female tutu-clad swans of Swan Lake. But they are also powerful, wild, ruthless and unreachable, as are Matthew Bourne’s half naked, muscular men with shaved heads – alluring and terrifying.

The performance continues in an increasingly frenzied setting, as the Prince’s obsession with the Swan grows. Ollivier takes the role of the Stranger, the Black Swan/Odile of traditional Swan Lakes, and appears in sexy black leather at a palace ball. Tantalising the Prince by scorning his affections in public, the Stanger dances provocatively with all the women at the ball. And yet the emotional tension between him and the Prince is palpable – can this lady’s man really be the same wild and heart-breaking creature of the Prince’s night time encounters?

The genius of this production does not lie in reimagining a well-known romantic ballet as a modern, male couple dance, though the homoerotic tension has got many tongues wagging. Nor does it lie in choreographing a jazz routine to Tchaikovsky soaring score, though this is an impressive achievement.

The reason for which this performance is, and will remain, a key production in the dance repertoire is that it shows us what a classical ballet is for. Not for tutus, not for repertoire steps and revered, un-modifiable canons. Ballet is not even for pointe shoes or scenes of pretty heroines against ungainly baddies. A real dance production will stir dark, buried emotions inside you. It will make you long for those wild and unharnessed feelings described by the music and incarnated in the dance.

There has not been a new performance of this kind since early twentieth century Paris, and Matthew Bourne, a fifty year old east Londoner, has created something worthy of balletic history.