THE greatest love story of all, Romeo and Juliet, will be screened at the Regent Centre on Tuesday, September 22. Kenneth Macmillan's ballet is celebrating its 50th anniversary and the production, made famous by Prima Ballerina Assoluta Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, who took 43 curtain calls at the premiere, will be presented for the cinema by Darcey Bussell.

The love-struck Romeo will be danced by Australian principal Steven McRae and his beautiful Juliet by American principal Sarah Lamb, who starred as Alice in the December 2014 screening of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Rich in the swaggering colour and period costume of Verona street life, the ballet has magnificent designs by Nicholas Georgiadis and a gripping score by Sergey Prokofiev, famed for the spine-tingling Dance of the Knights. With sword fighting, romance and heartbreak, the drama takes the audience from the sumptuous ballroom of the Capulets, to the sensational balcony pas de deux and the stark tomb of the final doomed meeting of the lovers.

Back on stage 50 years after the first curtain up, the production is set to resonate on the silver screen given Kenneth MacMillan's own love of film. Lady MacMillan said: “Kenneth was a complete movie nut; he loved film and it's this passion that makes his productions work so well on the big screen.

“When choreographing he would pre-empt where audiences would look next, capturing the imagination with every movement, and it's this innate sense of what would work on camera that so often drove his vision for the stage. “He also believed in creating real characters with real stories and in a ballet such as Romeo and Juliet the heartbreak and passion will be all the more evident up close and personal in cinemas.”

The screening begins at 7pm and the running time is three hours with two intervals.