Copenhagen in winter is hardly the same as Annandale-on-Hudson in the middle of summer. I had gone to Bard College’s Summerscape Festival to see yet another interpretation of that perennial dance favourite Romeo and Juliet, this time by Mark Morris. But in the humid warmth I couldn’t help thinking back to a bitter winter when I had travelled to Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre to research the first “modern” version of the ballet, credited to Vincenzo Galeotti around 1811. In the nearly 200 years since, Shakespeare’s “star cross’d lovers” have proved irresistible to choreographers from Ashton to Youskevitch.

Now it was Morris’s turn and his Romeo and Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare, to give it its full title, was, I knew, bound to be different from such familiar treatments as Kenneth MacMillan’s sweeping ballet. For a start, Morris’s dance vernacular is modern and individual, and anyway the word was out that the piece, to Prokofiev’s music, had a happy ending – something that Simon Morrison of Princeton University discovered when he was researching Prokofiev’s original score in Russia.