Juliet, Alone
I didn’t really believe we were going ahead without him until the opening bars rose from the orchestra pit and filled the Dance Hall the way a sunrise fills the sky.
Behind the curtain, the marketplace of Verona waited for a new day to begin; at the edge of the wings, Max and Charlie waited for their cue.
Charlie had one reassuring hand on Max’s caped shoulder, but he didn’t seem to need it.
He held himself with Romeo’s confidence, as if this was who he’d always been.
None of us had seen Nick since he went off in a taxi to Sander’s flat, but Frank had glimpsed his secretary Jackie rushing to meet him at the stage door while the rest of us were in hair and make-up, so I could only assume he was now holed up in his office. What that meant, we didn’t know.
I stood back in the darkness, out of everyone’s way. I didn’t need to be onstage for another fifteen minutes, but staying in the solitude of my dressing room, staring at Sander’s note until I risked missing my own cue, seemed unwise.
Besides, no matter what magnitude of crisis you’re enduring, you don’t turn down the chance to hear Prokofiev’s introduction to his greatest score up close. It hurt. It burned. But it burned gold.
The first notes of Romeo and Juliet are why the word “bittersweet” exists.
Everyone in the audience and every dancer in the cast knows exactly how this story will end.
But the end hasn’t happened yet. The flute that rises above the swell is so hopeful that despite the foreknowledge, despite four hundred years of iterations across all manner of media, you can’t help but believe that tonight, they’ll make it out alive.
That, just this once, there’s a happy ending on the other side.
* * *
My first lift in the ballet was not with Romeo, but Paris.
Lorenzo was steady and sure-footed, but the two of us had never socialised without Jamie around, which served us well for our respective roles: Juliet hardly knows Paris, but she goes into their first pas de deux in Act I with an open mind.
The turns and lifts are slow and controlled, to match the languid wind section.
It’s a sequence Juliet doesn’t realise she’s sleepwalking through in order to appease her family, until she comes out of it, crosses paths with a masked Romeo, and the haze falls away.
* * *
During the interval before Act III, having pleaded with Jackie for news only to be told that Sander was still missing, Carolyn, four months pregnant with her second child, pulled me into a hug, while Armand put his camera to one side and rubbed my shoulder. I trembled, but did not cry.
Juliet would be crying by now, in the lost time of the story before the curtain comes up again.
Upon hearing not only that her cousin was dead, but that Romeo was the one responsible, she would have shuddered and sobbed.
Whatever confrontation happens between them happens offstage, in that lost time.
* * *
By Act III, Juliet’s entire being has changed to withstand the turbulence around her.
Her father’s rage when she refuses to do the only thing expected of her – marry rich and make babies – peaks with a slap across her face, while her mother and nurse stand by, unwilling and unable to help.
None of them know about the vial of Friar Laurence’s sleeping draught stashed under her pillow.
She has begged them not to force her to marry Paris, this person who is still a stranger to her, who does not understand her, will never understand her, but whose patience can only last so long.
Compared to Romeo, trying to embrace Paris as a future husband is like putting her hands to a hot stove; when Juliet at long last seems to concede, and reprises their restrained pas de deux, she doesn’t hide her repulsion.
She leans away from him, lets her hair hang over her face and her body go limp.
That pas de deux never felt so easy as it did on opening night.
I was no longer acting: my own pain, fear, fury, and despair were doing all the work.
When I collapsed onto Juliet’s bed alone in illusory death, I really could have stayed still for the rest of the night, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.
* * *
In the final scene of Act III, I ran around the tomb on numb legs, letting my breath get away from me.
There were no technical tricks left in the score, only acting.
I had to leave it all on the stage. When I turned and saw Romeo lying on the ground, I felt sick, because for a half-second I’d expected to see Sander there, waiting for me with closed eyes.
Some part of me had truly believed that he’d run in and swap places with Max for the last two minutes of the ballet.