A clean-cut Romeo

The thought of another updated ballet is enough to drive you to drink. Not because they're not a good idea, they are, but because they're often no more than ballet in contemporary clothes.

With one or two obvious exceptions, such as Mats Ek's Carmen and Matthew Bourne's all-male swan Swan Lake, the dance vocabulary is unchanged and there are no new readings for modern lives. The result is ballet that neither equals the past nor pushes the art form forward.

And so it was last night with Royal New Zealand Ballet and its new-ish version of Romeo and Juliet. Christopher Hampson's production is a safe take on the doomed lovers, more schools matinee than Shakespearean tragedy. The setting is recent Italian, and the choreographic style is in the MacMillan mould, unsurprising given that Hampson trained at the Royal Ballet School when everyone was breathing MacMillan's air. Design-wise, the set is an ingenious revolve and the costumes are funky if chronologically confused - the girls are Fifties-neat, the men ghetto-fabulous. And almost everyone wears too much red, including Juliet, which feels wrong.

To his credit, Hampson has created some strong stage pictures. The wedding feast in Act II, glimpsed when Romeo and Juliet marry, brings the lovers' loss vividly to focus, and a new commedia dell'arte scene is nicely done.

He has also made Lady Capulet, Juliet's mother, very Mrs Robinson, which you sort of knew already, and he's tweaked bits ot the action, such as having Juliet see Romeo kill Tybalt.

None of this matters as much as knowing that Hampson's Romeo is a young person's production, with puppy-ish lead performers (Jane Turner as Juliet and Alex Wagner as Romeo), and the villains cartoon cut-outs. The sex is neat and the deaths are pretty, which will please the teens. Everyone else will fight the straitjacket that is neat, pretty ballet.

Until tomorrow. Information: 0870 737 7737.

Royal New Zealand Ballet: Romeo And Juliet