Swans' Way.('Swan Lake')

If you're trying to tell someone who Matthew Bourne is, all you have to say is "He's the English choreographer who made the 'Swan Lake' with the male swans," and the person says, "Oh, yes, the gay 'Swan Lake.' " In the traditional "Swan Lake," the Prince falls in love with a female swan. In Bourne's version, the beloved is a male swan. This was a big sensation, and it supplied every journalist covering the show with a ready-made lead. But what was important about the gender switch was that it made this old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous.

To many people, of course, homosexuality is no longer a social danger, but Bourne restored it to that status. In the canonic "Swan Lake," the lead Swan and her cohort are maidens who have been turned into swans by an evil sorcerer. In Bourne's ballet, the swans are swans--they haven't been changed into anything--and, like real swans, they are ferocious. They swoop, they dive; the lead Swan fixes the Prince with a cold, glassy stare. In other words, this is a romance not just between a male and a male but between a human being and an animal--a situation that, needless to say, would have no place in the modern, normalizing homophile plot. Nor is this "Swan Lake," though updated (London, swinging sixties), really part of the main line of postmodern resettings of opera and ballet classics. It doesn't have that history-bashing note. It's "edgy"; it takes on not just homosexuality but also the domestic problems of Britain's Royal Family (Diana, Fergie), which were very much in the press in 1995, when the show opened. Fundamentally, however, Bourne's "Swan Lake" is sincere, in the nineteenth-century sense, and about a nineteenth-century subject: the idea that we all have souls that are bigger than the world, and that romantic passion reveals this to us, fatally. The love that kills still exists, and it still kills.

That is the symbol, but the homosexual text was quite overt. You would think, then, that the show would have appealed to a limited audience. In fact, its first season, at Sadler's Wells, in London, sold out. Then it moved to a commercial theatre in the West End, where it had a hundred and twenty more performances. In 1998, it opened on Broadway, where it ran for four months. It has been playing, off and on, around the world, ever since. Last December, it returned to London, and the ticket line wound around the block every day. Well before the opening, the box office had taken in more than a million pounds.

Other hits followed. Bourne is now a busy man. When I first met with him, last November, he was about to open three shows in the space of three days. "Swan Lake" was being remounted in Paris; "Mary Poppins," which he codirected, was being installed on Broadway; and his newest show, "Edward Scissorhands," which opened in London last year, was having its American premiere, in San Francisco. "Edward" will move into the Brooklyn Academy of Music next week.

Bourne looks like the man on the street: medium height, solid build, round, open face, short brown hair, boring brown sweaters. He is forty-seven, though he looks ten years younger. He is soft-spoken, modest, and disarmingly candid. He came, he says, from "a very, very ordinary East End working-class family." Jim Bourne worked for the water board; his wife, June, was a secretary; and they had two sons, Dan and Matthew, in that order. Dan is now married, with two daughters; he has been working in investment banks since he was sixteen. Matthew, on the other hand, was clearly not destined for banking. His parents were musical-comedy fans, and, from the time he was four or five, they sat him down in front of the television set to watch movie musicals with them. Within a few years, he was staging musicals of his own, at his school. "I did a fifteen-minute version of 'Lady and the Tramp,' " he recalls, "and a ten-minute version of 'Hello, Dolly!' I just stole whatever I could remember."

When he was a child, he says, he was a terrible showoff. "I was loud and always answering all the teacher's questions. 'Miss, miss,' you know, with my hand in the air. I think I was quite annoying. I remember the teacher throwing the chalk at me once." The other children teased him, but he paid no attention. "I felt like I had something to offer, and why would they make fun of me?" That changed with adolescence: "I became very introverted." He came to hate school, and now the teasing did get to him: "I realized that I wasn't like everyone else, and I started to keep things about myself hidden." He had one friend, a boy named Simon Carter (who is still his best friend), and together they became autograph hounds. Two or three times a week, they would take the bus to the West End and stand by the stage doors. For working-class boys who grow up to be theatre artists, this is a common story.

When Bourne finished school, he had no thought of university. All he wanted was to be where someone was putting on a show. He eventually took a job at London's National Theatre, where he worked in the bookstore and ushered. One of the other ushers told him about the Laban Centre, one of London's premier modern-dance academies, and he decided to try out. He had little hope of getting in. He was twenty-two years old and had never taken a dance lesson. But the Laban Centre, like all dance schools, was desperate for men, and ...