The setting is the late 20th century. But what makes Borune's Swan Lake seem new is something else: it takes the old ballet's idea of a struggle against fate and translates it into a tale about a fight against repression. The traditional Swan Lake has a central nexus of 4 characters: the queen of the swan-maidens, Odette; Prince Sigefried; the sorcerer Rothbart; and his enchantress daughter Odile. Like the old ballet, the Bourne version has 4 key characters: the male Swan, bare-chested and whitelegged; the Prince, tormented and increasingly psychotic; his publicly comme il faut but privately hypocritical mother the Queen; and the Stranger, clad in black leather. What's most striking is that, without taking any beauty or drama away from the swans, Bourne transfers to the Prince much of the psychological drama that in the ballet had belonged to Odette. Here it's the Prince who hopes for liberty, who struggles against repression, who needs love to make him sade. The Swan, by contrast, is free will and eventually loving. The famous swan music is still his, and the memorable swan choereography is reconceived for him: all of which makes him an overwhelming presence in the Prince's mind. In strictly narrative terms, the ballet's 'Rothbart' figure is replaced, in Bourne's production, by the dangerously scheming Secretary. He counts for much less than Rothbart did; but that's because here the Queen counts for far more. She is, as Rothbart was. the sinister controlling schemer who blights the prince's hope. And yet, in the selfish lascivious way, she's just funny. One person alone can't see the joke, and that's her son. Swan and Stranger, the freest people onstage, are played by the same dancer. This may seem to be just a gender-bending equivalent of the ballet's double heroine, Odette-Odile; but this make role has a psychological force unlike anything in ballet: it's filmic. Bourne's psychodramaowes much to such Hitchcock films. And when all the swans flock on the Prince's bed in the final scene, Bourne has openly acknowledged his source: Hitchcock's The Birds.
It is in the final scene that Bourne's drama rises to its greatest heights. Most ballet choreographers have had a problem with how little music - and how many climaxes - Tchaikovsky provided here. Bourne, by contrast, rises to the score, and finds in its intense countinuity, cue after cue for his unfolding psychodrama. One unexpected twist follows another. The prince meets the swans. The many swans meet the one Swan. The Swan meets the Prince. The story keeps changing, and crisis piles upon crisis. The dance language changes too. The swans no longer look free. They are visions in the Prince's mind, and they have taken on aspects of his own knotted body-language; but they make it threatening, malign. The Swan too is altered, and it is with him that the arc of the drama reaches its most heroic climax. At one point, thinking that his Prince is dead, he opens his mouth in a huge howl. It takes us back to that other myth: the song of the swan who has lost his mate and is about to die.