Even those who have not yet seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake will have been hard pressed to escape the posters prominent in the tube throughout the noughties or else might have caught Adam Cooper’s brief appearance as the swan at the end of Billy Elliot. The production is now in its fifteenth year, making it the longest running ballet in both the West End and on Broadway, which is a tribute to the brilliance of Bourne’s choreography, design and eye to detail. What struck me the most when I watched it recently, for the third time, was how the dance has matured with time. Whether I had become more astute or whether Bourne has refined and developed the production, I could not say, yet I certainly understood much more what Bourne is getting at. The development of Swan Lake owes much to both Bourne’s later productions (in particular The Car Man and Dorian Grey ) and to the triumphs of the Gay Rights Movement in the new millennium. The prince is not driven into the arms of a m ...