Ballet
Wild Eloquence
By CLIVE BARNES
PRorcomv in two moods, Struchkova in two roles, and what are presumably two out of the three or four best ballets produced in Russia since Soviet Ballet became Soviet, the Bolshoi's most recent Covent Garden productions, Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, are as rewarding on as many levels as a multiple car-park. They are both spectaculars on a scale ballet does not attempt elsewhere. Created for the tastes of a majority audience (a fact we cannot remember too often) they aim first and foremost at instant communication. But one is an extravaganza and the other is an epic, and it seems very right and natural to think of them, clear-sightedly and unpatronisingly, in terms of Hollywood, tsthetics.
Cinderella's familiarity to us from Ashton's version for the Royal Ballet is unhelpful. Ashton approached Cinderella as an Englishman and saw it as part of the English pantomime tradition. Rotislav Zakharov produces it as a Perrault fairy-talc, a blood-sister to The Sleeping Beauty. Indeed such was Prokofiev's avowed aim : he wrote, '1 conceived it as a classical ballet with variations, adagios, pas de deux and so on.'
Choreographically Ashton's is infinitely the finer work, and even as a production it is more adroit but it is also decidedly less glittering. With the Ashton one is never quite certain that Buttons is not going to enter at any moment to lead the audience in a little quiet community singing. With the Zakharov, despite the shabby, spangled grandeur of the setting, the commonplaces of the choreography, and the naiveté of the characters, the provenance of the piece, its debt to Perrault, Tchaikovsky and Petipa is not for one second in doubt. And as danced by the Bolshoi it is wonderfully entertaining. Struchkova, all spun-sugar lightness, with either the elegant Mikhail Lavrovsky or the impetuous Vladimir Vasiliev as her ardent Prince, is just the radiant girl to have a ball, while her kitchen-maid is honest and touching.
Romeo and Juliet we have seen before. In 1956 this grand Renaissance fresco gave us our first sight of Soviet ballet, and it remains a master- piece. It is the Fokine conception of a dramatic ballet extended to its ultimate development, and in a way it is the monumental mausoleum of all Fokine's hopes. Magnificent, alive with tear- ing passion, fever-hot with feeling, it seems, after twenty-three years, to have been a ballet that spawned no successor. The choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky marshals his forces with the skill of an Eistenstein, and choreography has never been more integrated with music and theme, more articulate in effect.
Struchkova, sensitive to every nuance, dances with grace and feeling, and Maris Liepa is a young lion as Romeo. There is a wild eloquence to these lovers, but it is Lavrovsky's (and Prokofiev's) triumph that all the characters in this enormous canvas are picked out with photo- graphic accuracy: Yaroslav Sekh's sardonic Mercutio, the grave Friar Laurence of Erik Volodin, the hell-bent killer of Vladimir Levashev's cat-like Tybalt, the staring-eyed mad- ness of Alexander Lapauri's Capulet. But per- haps most of all it is the crowds one remembers: the street-fights, where steel sparks on steel; the huge Veronese banquet, plump and stately; the deaths and funerals, where black hysteria shrieks under an Italian sun.
Previous page
