Ballet
Showomanship
By CLIVE BARNES AFTER an absence of seven years Carmen Amaya—gipsy, dancer and Spanish firecracker —has returned to London at the Westminster Theatre, com- plete with an afterthought of a company. What she offers is a one-woman exhibition, the far from negligible artistic merit of which is only incidental to its basic showornanship. This is her third invasion of London and her programme has changed somewhat since 1948 when she was the first of our post-war Spanish visitors, setting a new theatrical trend later to be exploited by Antonio, Pilar Lopez, Jose Greco and the rest. Previously she permitted a degree of competition from her company—even the redoubtable Teresa and Luisillo took their first London bows under her auspices—and her whole programme had a rough, spontaneous vitality. Now her general bill of fare is more varied yet less appetising. Best of her supporting dancers are a Murillo-like urchin, Luis Flores, and the more elegant Diego Amaya, but for tbe most part they all remain amiably in the background, enthusiastically com- petent and inadvertently discreet; quite good enough to stop the audience from getting restive, yet never encouraging it to forget just whom it has come to see. No spotlight is ever more effec- tive or flattering than surrounding competence. Although it is just Amaya's show, this self-styled 'Queen of the Gypsies' nevertheless gives value to all who cross her box-office palm with silver.
Amaya makes her entrance, gliding in with the menace of a torpedo but the statuesque flam- boyance of a ship's figurehead. From the first flick of the preposterously beflounced skirt trail- ing behind her, almost the entire audience— aficionados, ex-trippers from the Costa Brava, and the highly vocal delegates from London's appar- ently vast Spanish colony alike—seems to breathe a sigh of communication. There is more than a suspicion of charlatanism in her dancing. That face grotesquely contorted beyond any, mortal passion. Those fierce stampings, like sharp clat- terings on a hot tin roof, with which she responds to the' throaty, aphrodisiac incantations of the flamenco singer. Even those ritualistic curtain calls with arms held out in matador triumph, then the expansive grin and theatrical nod. It's all too much, too artificial. The woman is less than an artist, yet more than a phoney : the real larger- than-life, twenty-two-carat, guaranteed, war- 'ranted, theatrical personality.
At times she is preciously near to a good- natured parody of herself. She ends a furious comedy number—full of beautifully controlled dancing--by going boss-eyed and crossing herself. This is an easy sort of trick, but she believes in it and we love it. And then at the end, after she has cheerfully displayed not only the purest of flamenco style but her whole wonderful armoury of show-biz weapons, she comes on dressed in tight pants and throws herself into her own par- ticular party-piece as a finale. Supported by the dry, pistol-clear hand-claps and finger-snaps of the company and the plangent twangs of her guitarists, she dances an exuberant zapateado, like a more virile, less finicky version of Antonio. Her hair falls over her eyes, her body spins • round, her feet first whisper then pound out their insistent tattoo, the tension rises and falls until the final unleashed , climax before the curtain. Viva Amaya!
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