These Violent Delights review – Scottish Ballet’s feverish Romeo and Juliet is bold and unsettling

Edinburgh film festival
A taut, dreamlike reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy strips away romance in favour of dread, creating an engrossing and fiercely physical dance film

Scottish Ballet, under the direction of Christopher Hampson and Oscar Sansom, gives us an engrossing dance riff on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The title alludes to Friar Lawrence saying, at the couple’s secret wedding ceremony, that “these violent delights have violent ends”, that their passion will consume itself in the act of marriage – which is true, but not in the way he thinks.

The ballet is fierce, athletic, knotty and sensual; it is not a filmed event beneath a proscenium arch but a film that inhabits its own theatrical space. The whole event is a radically impressionistic compression of the play’s action, bringing it down to just 70 minutes, an extended nightmarish dream sequence with a repeated and disturbing scene of Juliet being dragged across the grass by an unseen force. This version chucks out, among other things, the balcony scene, and it interestingly modifies the ending, suggesting that the double-suicide might not be a trick that goes wrong but an anguished mutual gesture of despair.