Rudolf Nureyev’s Romeo & Juliet, made for the 1977 Silver Jubilee, returns for its 50th anniversary to the Coliseum stage where it was first danced.
English National Ballet dances Rudolf Nureyev’s Romeo & Juliet at the London Coliseum in Covent Garden from Thursday 14 January 2027, for the production’s 50th anniversary.
Nureyev made the ballet for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee while he was filming Ken Russell’s Valentino. Its first rehearsals ran late in the evenings and on Sundays at the Donmar Studios in Covent Garden, now the Donmar Warehouse.
He had studied the play in Russian and planned a score of 13th- and 14th-century music before returning to Prokofiev. The first run lasted 25 performances, and Nureyev and Patricia Ruanne danced the leads at every one.
The final scene was never properly rehearsed. Nureyev and Ruanne discussed it over dinner and refined it night by night through that first season into the version danced now.
The staging fills Verona with market crowds, acrobats and street brawls, turns the second act on a knife drawn in the square, and closes in the Capulet crypt.
The anniversary tour ends in St Martin’s Lane, on the stage where the ballet opened in June 1977. The English National Ballet Philharmonic plays Prokofiev’s score live, the Dance of the Knights among it.