Ballet
Master and Puppets
By CLIVE BARNES
BENOIS is dead. The man who, perhaps more than anyone else, invented the Ballets Russes which Diaghilev patented, died in Paris last week. Minor White Russian painter and art histor- ian, ballet designer, great-uncle of Peter Ustinov—the politely marble-obituaries are now being put in place, the tiny wreaths of tribute propped up against his reputation. Alexandre Benois is dead, tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of an already week-old newspaper. How important was he? What did he do? It is difficult to explain without giving a pocket-history of modern ballet, for Benois was prominent among that circle, sur- rounding the impresario Diaghilev, who revolu- tionised the entire shape of theatrical dancing. Benois, Fokine, Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Bakst, every night a curtain rises in the ballet theatres of the world something of their influence survives. They found ballet as an after-dinner entertain- ment, and they left it renewed as a form of human expression. And of all those collaborators—St. Petersburg anarchists in white ties and silk hats— probably it was Benois who had the clearest idea of what they were about.
By a coincidence, also last week, the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden revived their production of Petrushka, one of Benois's most famous works. Planned weeks ahead, it was not intended as a tribute to the dead artist. Nor was it.
The Royal Ballet's Petrushka suffers more from inadequacies than faults. True the harsh, thought- less lighting gives Benois' impression of the St. Petersburg May Day Fair the hazy warmth of a Mediterranean dawn, and the, orchestra's limp handling of Stravinsky's music is equally culpable.
A great work of art is, inter alit:, one reborn with each successive generation. To us Petrushka is a symbol of vain and glorious protest—he shouts, therefore he lives—but to his originators, Benois, Stravinsky and Fokine, he was, in Benois' own words, 'the personification of the spiritual and suffering side of humanity . the poetical principle.' Yet while its implications may have changed, the structure of the work remains un- altered. The ballet is set on two planes of reality; the triangle of symbolic puppets—the pathetic, heroically aspiring Petrushka, the lewd, vacuous Doll-Ballerina and the sensual, arrogant Blacka- moor—are placed against a verismo backdrop of the St. Petersburg of a century ago. This super- imposition of styles is the basic device of the ballet, and music, design and choreography com- bine to convey the theme's dual nature and poetic ambiguity.
At Covent Garden the puppets are remarkably well played. Alexander Grant's Petrushka is for- midably, some would say disconcertingly, con- temporary. Gone are the boot-button eyes of the Nijinsky photographs, gone also is something of the sawdust pathos. In its place is an abject rebel- liousness, where every grotesque jerk has the desperation of a still hopeless protest. Nadia Nerina's empty-faced tart of a Doll and Peter Clegg's oafishly virile Blackamoor give just the right dramatic counterthrust to Grant's 'poetical principle.' Yet these performances are wasted in a production totally incapable of providing the realistic background against which they are intended to move.
It is sometimes said that British dancers cant act. Anyone wishing to further this probably IT- just allegation should see Petrushka. The fair- ground scenes are meant to be crowded with life; instead they are played here with such amateurish enthusiasm that one is soon wondering just who are meant to be the puppets. Partly this is slipshod production, but the real difficulty is that these people are too young for their parts. Here and there one of the older dancers—a Leslie Edwards or a Rosemary Lindsay—shows what can be done, but the rest, be-whiskered and be-padded young- sters with their fresh faces hidden under cheerfullY applied dollops of unbecoming make-up, cavort around with the maximum of high spirits.and the minimum of conviction.
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