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Ashton Triple Bill
The Royal Ballet
by Jane SimpsonIt's not that often these days that the Royal Ballet gives us an Ashton triple bill, so expectation was high for their recent programme at the new Sadler's Wells Theatre, with Les Patineurs and Birthday Offering carried over from last season and a long overdue revival of Enigma Variations. As so often recently, our hopes were only very partially fulfilled.
Patineurs ought to be an almost sure-fire success: it has that wonderful quality of inevitability about the choreography, and besides that, it's fun: all it needs is three technically strong dancers with some idea of characterisation, and a nice couple for the romantic pas de deux. Unfortunately on the opening night only Miyako Yoshida, as the fouettee-spinning Blue Girl, got it just right - she's having a wonderful season. The Blue Boy was Justin Meissner, deputising for the departed Kumakawa. He's done the role before but still looked almost crippled by nerves - together with his always rather stiff shoulders and neck, this seemed to lock him up and deprive him of any fluency. However he was already better by the next night and reports said that by the end of the week he was really quite impressive. The White couple were Gary Avis and Gillian Revie; she in particular looking completely miscast and unhappy. She's a fine MacMillan dancer and was one of the most impressive in Forsythe's 'in the middle' earlier in the season, but this whole evening demonstrated that she's by no stretch of the imagination an Ashton dancer. A second cast the next night showed Belinda Hatley at the top of her form as a Blue Girl - she and Yoshida would make a terrific pair.
We saw Birthday Offering earlier in the summer, during the celebrations for Ninette de Valois' 100th birthday, and I rather reserved judgment as it was shown on a cramped stage and couldn't possibly look at its best. Here, on the much larger new stage, I'd hoped for better things - but, as perhaps you've guessed by now, no such luck. For one thing the company seems to have abandoned for good the original setting: it wasn't much, just a flight of steps across the back and some standing chandeliers, but now it's all done on a flat stage and the chanderliers hang from above - and why change it? The women's costumes have come in for a huge amount of derision - they're knee length, bell shaped tutus with rather stiff looking bodices, all in different colours, and I personally rather like them: their slightly Edwardian air is a key ingredient of the ballet.
This piece needs seven outstanding female soloists, and the present casts don't come anywhere near providing them. If you put the best of the various casts together you might perhaps get five satisfactory, though not brilliant performances. Best were the young Mara Galeazzi, Belinda Hatley and Yoshida (again), with Sarah Wildor outscoring Darcey Bussell in the leading ballerina's role.
Many of the new audience had never seen Enigma before, and most of the ones I spoke to were disappointed in it. 'Very pretty, but...' was a typical comment. It's hard to blame the dancers: almost none of them can have seen the ballet themselves, and are presumably only doing what they're told, and it's especially hard to cast a piece with so many parts for mature adults from such a predominantly young company. But even so... Somehow all the flavour has been lost: only when Genesia Rosato took over Lady Elgar in the second cast, and when Bruce Sansom and Sarah Wildor did the solos created by Dowell and Sibley, did the ballet truly come to life, and some of the other characterisations almost had me in tears of despair. It's a ballet about friendship, but this doesn't seem enough for this MacMillan-raised generation, and suddenly it's made to seem about suppressed lust instead.