Ballet
Forty years on
Robin Young
10 witness a performance of Romeo and Juliet by Fonteyn and Nureyev is these days a rare and enviable privilege, and one of the more paradoxical of theatrical experiences. For here you will see an elegant and well-beloved woman of fifty-six attempt the impossible — of passing herself off as an impetuous girl of fourteen — in the certain knowledge that in the eyes of her audience she cannot fail. Covent Garden on Monday night was full to the gunwales with Margot-lovers for whom she could do no wrong. She earned their adulation in the past. It cossets and sustains her now. Fonteyn is an artist, and she is charmingly and utterly human. Otherwise she could never have been a genius. And so what we get — and all that we can properly expect — is an accom plished performance, not a triumph over nature. Conscious no doubt that she now lacks the pace and speed for adolescent pyroteehnics in the duets to come, Fonteyn gambols a lot (if one may pun it that way) on her playful entry with the Nurse. It does not, to my mind, pay dividends, but it sets the standard for what is to follow, where a lot of sometimes fussy detail with hands and face are pressed to service for what feet and legs can no longer provide.
• There is thus about Fonteyn's Juliet an arch and deliberate feyness that may remind the cynical irresistibly of Robert Helpmann's Ugly Sister in Cinderella. But the cynical do not come to these performances. At times the artifice shows, as in the emphatically shuttering eyelids whenever Juliet is about to decide a course of action — running off (unfluently) to Friar Laurence, or letting it be thought that she will accept Paris.
What is essential to the illusion that Fonteyn tries to sustain is that the figure on stage should seem to be a girl behaving like a woman, and never like a woman behaving childishly. There is too much of the latter in her reactions to the enforced betrothal with Paris. And when she takes her farewell embrace with Romeo in the bedroom, it is not the voluptuous sorrow of virgin spring we sense, but the hysterical and chilling grip of the cold wind in August. And yet, and yet — the momentary hands-on-breasts awakening to womanhood she handles more poignantly than many who are decades her junior. She can work wonders when she is almost still. A pity that in the tomb she relapses to frenetic scrabbling before finalising the tragedy.
Nureyev, whose role is also becoming a visible effort to him, supports manfully, though his acting of Romeo's playful scenes with his mates is becoming dangerously coarse. He must beware looking like the dishclout. David Wall was a curiously ineffective Mercutio — bombastic rather than witty, too heavy in emphasis and, sadly, in movement. In this company David Ashmole's Benvolio looked uncomfortable and Derek Rencher's Paris uncommonly distinguished.
The street fights may have had some new brawlers among them, because there seemed to be several who thought they could win a swordfight by watching the spot where the blades had been rehearsed to meet. David Adams and Michael Somes as Montague and Capulet have traditionally fought as though they believed the winner would be the one who could wave his stick highest in the air, and this is now beginning to look ridiculous. The brass section, too, sounded as though they were using their instruments to gargle with.
It goes without saying that at the curtain calls the daffodils fell like waterfalls, the bouquets were enormous, the applause ecsta tic, and the acknowledgements from the stage both gracious and charming. It is, in its way, an inspiring event. It is something one may wish to see, not from morbid curiosity, but to see great artists working their hardest and reaping their reward. But it drives you to the sad conclusion that, as far as these roles are concerned, their best they gave already.
At the Festival Hall the problem is not the age (though sometimes the health) of the prima
ballerina, but of the production itself. Nutcracker is one year older yet,, and creaks arthritically through its transformations With_
Previous page
