The Royal Ballet Schools Matinee, Romeo & Juliet
A young audience relished a performance of Romeo and Juliet, part of The Royal Ballet’s Schools Matinees programme
Very few thrills beat watching a live stage performance in a theatre packed with schoolchildren. Their uncontained excitement and their unfiltered, very vocal reactions add new layers, new emotions to the show. And so it was that I was recently privileged to watch Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, a ballet I know very well, through fresh eyes at a Royal Ballet schools matinee.
A collective gasp of wonderment when the lights went up on the massed ranks of knights in the Capulets’ ball made me re-evaluate the sheer brilliance of Nicholas Georgiadis’ painterly sets and costumes; titters of anticipation as Romeo and Juliet slowly moved to kiss at the end of the rapturous balcony pas de deux attested to the exquisite build up of MacMillan’s choreography.
And the few boos levelled at Tybalt during curtain calls left no doubt as to who this unforgiving young audience felt was to blame for the tragedy.
The Royal Ballet and Opera School Matinees programme affords schoolchildren across the UK what is, more often than not, their first experience of ballet and opera.
Schools are invited to apply for tickets at a heavily discounted £7.50. For comparison, top stalls tickets for normal performances of Romeo and Juliet go for £180, with the cheapest seats at the vertigo-inducing back of the amphitheatre at £32. In allocation priority is given to schools from lower socio-economic areas and places with less access to cultural opportunities.
This season seven performances of opera and ballet feature in school matinees.
The excitement starts with the trip. In the matinee I attended there were contingents from Cornwall and Yorkshire among the total 1,500 children present.
And it explodes into an almighty collective roar when the house lights go down. The noise subsides into an expectant hush as the orchestra under Martin Georgiev’s baton strikes the first notes of Prokofiev’s eloquent score.
The Royal Ballet school matinees don’t stint on casting: no fewer than four principal dancers led a sparkling, committed ensemble in a memorable performance of Romeo and Juliet.
I was hugely impressed with Joseph Sissens’s reckless, irrepressible, fun-loving Mercutio, his graphic death-scene creating a stunned hush in the house.
Matthew Ball’s Tybalt was a carefully detailed character, a smirking borderline psychopath, who brought cold menace to his every gesture; and, unlike in other interpretations, didn’t even need to be drunk to provoke what proved to be the fateful fight.
My focus, though, was on Ryochi Hirano (a personal favourite) as Romeo and Melissa Hamilton as Juliet, in her first performance since her long overdue promotion to principal dancer.
Highly experienced mature dancers both, they brought a depth of understanding to their very personal readings of their characters.
Ryoichi Hirano and Melissa Hamilton in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in The Royal Ballet’s Schools Matinee © RBO 2025 Andrej Uspenski
Hirano, a deeply intelligent, elegant and fluent dance actor, was a laddish, carefree Romeo, who didn’t take life too seriously until he fell for Juliet; but rather than the love-struck follower of Juliet’s lead Hirano’s Romeo was a very masculine initiator, delicately stressing the little gestures that guided Juliet to him.
Ryoichi Hirano in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in The Royal Ballet’s Schools Matinee © RBO 2025 Andrej Uspenski
Melissa Hamilton is a beautiful technician and a warm, instinctive interpreter. Radiant in the ball scene, once she fell in love her feelings became internalised, eschewing the frenzied passion of other ballerinas, but no less intense and affecting for that. It was as if her Juliet couldn’t quite comprehend the immensity of the love that had taken over her entire being.
Whereas other Juliets very much drive the action, Hamilton’s dazed Juliet is happy to follow Romeo wherever he leads.
Melissa Hamilton in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in The Royal Ballet’s Schools Matinee © RBO 2025 Andrej Uspenski
Hugely enjoyable, this Royal Ballet schools matinee was a very grown up performance, a Romeo and Juliet that never patronised its young audience, but rather gave them a taste of how exciting dance can be. They are, after all, potentially the paying audiences of the future.
© Teresa Guerreiro
(Banner image credit: Ryoichi Hirano and Melissa Hamilton in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in The Royal Ballet’s Schools Matinee © RBO 2025 Andrej Uspenski)
Romeo and Juliet is in repertoire at the Royal Opera House 4 March to 26 May 2025. Full info and tickets here