First staged at Sadler's Wells theatre in London in 1995, it has been performed in the UK, the USA, Europe, Russia, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Israel, China and Singapore.
[2] The plot of the ballet revolves around a young crown prince, his distant mother,his desire for freedom and his love portrayed as a swan who has been cursed by an evil sourcerer von Rothbart.
In Scene 2, arrayed in his full dress uniform, the Prince becomes bored by a boat christening, a ribbon cutting, and other official tasks.
In Scene 3, the Queen, one of her admiring soldiers, the Private Secretary, the Prince, and the Girlfriend all appear in a theatre box, where they watch a ballet that is staged for the actual audience as well as for the characters.
The Girlfriend's responses to the dance as well as her eventual dropping her purse from the royal box annoy the Queen and von Rothbart.
Scene 4 finds the Prince drinking in his private chambers in front of a mirror, to his mother's shock.
In Scene Seven, he sees the Girlfriend being paid off by von Rothbart, and he is totally shattered to discover that the only person who appeared to love him is a fake.
While sitting in the street at the end of Scene Seven the Prince imagines a group of swans flying towards him but the vision disappears.
Distraught and disappointed that he will never find affection, the Prince writes a suicide note and goes to throw himself into a lake at a public park inhabited by swans.
Scene 1 begins with princesses from various European nations and their escorts arriving at the palace gates for a grand ball.
It commences with the arrival of the Queen and the Prince and some formal dancing, but quickly degenerates into a debauched party of drinking and lascivious come-ons.
The Prince sees something of his beloved Swan in the son, and he is very attracted to his bravado and animal magnetism but shocked by his lewdness, especially towards his mother.
During bump and grind group numbers and a sequence of national dances, it becomes clear that the Queen is powerfully attracted to von Rothbart's son.
The most conspicuous change Bourne made was to remove the subplot of the von Rothbart conspiracy to put his son on the throne.
The identity of the Stranger becomes even more vague and Bourne prefers to leave him and his relationship with the Prince up to the individual interpretation of the viewer.
In the final act, the Prince, regarded as having lost his mind, is confined to an asylum in a room with a high barred window, and is treated by a doctor and a team of nurses wearing masks that resemble the Queen's face, in a scene reminiscent of his dressing at the beginning of the ballet.
The only threat to her eternal happiness was if she fell in love with a mortal and bore his child, as she would then lose her immortality.
According to Alastair Macaulay (formerly chief dance critic of The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and chief theatre critic of the Financial Times), the Ondine myth is said to be an image of psycho-sexual distress: the nymph is a forlorn image of repressed virginity, anxious that she will never achieve womanly fulfillment, while her feminine nemesis that leads her husband astray represents the confident seductive power that threatens her hopes.
Having a man in the role of lead Swan suggests that the Prince's struggle has repressed gay love at its core, and changes the realm of the plot from magical to psychological.
The strength, the beauty, the enormous wingspan of these creatures suggests to the musculature of a male dancer more readily than a ballerina in her white tutu.
In order to accommodate his revised scenario, Bourne somewhat altered Tchaikovsky's score, reordering several numbers and omitting others.
[7] Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake has collected over 30 international awards, including: The final scene of the film Billy Elliot (2000) shows the lead character, Billy, played by Adam Cooper, as an adult about to perform in this production as the lead Swan.