From this moment on, the atmosphere darkens considerably and never lifts again: even the most sparkling passages are haunted by a profound sense of fatality. As the curtain rises on the third act, Juliet wakes beside the eerily seductive figure of Death, clad in a gown and silver undergarments. The bedroom pas de deux bears the indelible mark of the recent deaths in the duels, and yet love still holds its ground against mortality. This sequence is far removed from more conventionally sensual interpretations: it begins in bitterness and grows into a desperate tenderness as the lovers cling to one another in a state of total abandonment. Nureyev then uses a kind of split-screen effect to externalise Juliet’s decision to take the potion, her double materialising her fears and the imagined agony of its effects, thereby elevating the scene into a harrowing exploration of her mental state. Equally chilling is the appearance of the ghosts of Tybalt and Mercutio, who, in a highly cinematic effect, move with haunting fluidity while Juliet remains motionless. The pizzicato of the “Morning Serenade” accompanies the courtesan scene with delightful brilliance, while Andrea Sarri’s Paris is rendered with elegant refinement. The narrative then shifts towards its tragic conclusion with the male pas de deux between Romeo and Benvolio, in which Romeo learns of Juliet’s death: a demanding choreographic dialogue that gives outward form to his shattering heartbreak through expansive, despairing lines. The final scene in the tomb is heavy with marble and darkness; the lovers’ last moments are stripped of any romanticised touch. The choreography of their deaths is visceral, leaving the audience with a stark image of wasted youth.

Nureyev achieves a masterpiece here through a highly distinctive aesthetic code, founded on unforgettable stage imagery and finely nuanced character relationships, all centred on the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos: Juliet learns above all through love and desire, whereas Romeo’s path to understanding is paved with violence and death, his fate marked by relentless misfortune, his tragic dimension making him the story’s centre of gravity. While other choreographers linger over Juliet’s development from girl to woman, Nureyev presents her as passionate and resolute from the outset. It is Romeo who truly changes and develops, guided by Juliet’s emotional force, in a relationship that seems to some extent to echo Nureyev’s own biography and his special bond with Margot Fonteyn. Ultimately, the ballet’s success also lies in how much of his own life and immense theatrical knowledge Nureyev was able to invest in it, as well as in his fidelity to Prokofiev, which mirrors Prokofiev’s own fidelity to Shakespeare, making this one of the most deeply revealing versions of the drama, one that comes closer to the inner truth of its characters than the spoken text itself.