Ballet
The Fratricide Squads
By CLIVE BARNES
The Antigone legend is given almost intact, with that gnarled Theban family tree in full and tortuous flower. The death of Father (Edipus, the suicide of Mother Jocasta, the love of Antigone for Hiemon, the machinations of Creon, the fratricidal war of Polynices and Etiocles, hardly one blood-stained incident is omitted. until that penultimate horror when Antigone faces Crean over her brother's lifeless body and stands to the death for his burial rights.
Cranko is alone among British choreographers in distributing the moral tracts he has tucked away in his knapsack, and I personally like him the better for it. Here he would seem to be say- ing, 'War is futile and only the politicans can win,' a timeless, timely message. But if messages were art, poker-worked mottoes would stand higher on Parnassus. One must delve less deeply to find such a work's ultimate importance.
The ballet is strangely lacking in tragic feeling: largely because its diffuse chronicle has no real focus. The story covers too much ground for Cranko not to miss that pincer-movement of tragic jaws closing on its trapped mouse of a victim. When at the end, the tragic flame does at last flicker as Antigone defies Creon, she can only muster up the dignified pathos of an Edith Cavell awaiting execution. Furthermore—with the solitary exception of Jocasta's grandiose suicide---Cranko has followed Racine and his Greeks in keeping to those revered bienseances that forbid deeds of violence to be shown on stage. As a result even Antigone breathes her last in the dust of the ignominious wings, but in ballet there can be no messengers, no chorus to give articulate memorial to her unseen death throes. This is a loss, and a very palpable loss.
Yet the chronicle still moves swiftly enough and seems much briefer than its forty-eight- minute span. The story is told with economical clarity and a welcome tautness. Cranko's choreography and production have some superb moments, spasmodically touching heights his ballets have probably never before reached. The battle scenes, with the opposing armies, incited by the hell-bent brothers, stamping and gesticulat- ing with that ferocious pomposity of tribal-war dancers, swarm across the stage in precisely frozen anger. Equally fine are the two contrasted love passages for Antigone and Htemon—the first conventionally spring-like, the second weighed down with the imminence of parting and the smell of death.
Cranko pushes his story along with declama- tory gestures, always suitable and sometimes tellingly expressive, which enable his characters to emerge from the choreographic mass. For the most part abandoning academic technique, he— like' Jerome Robbins- --has here ventured into a kind of expressionist dancing. Too often this is choreographically the work's main fault. Cranko uses massive symmetrical patterns, reminiscent of Massine's symphonic style, which convey a sense of repose where they should be screwing up tension.
The music itself, by the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. is modern in an old-fashioned way. Echoes of early Stravinsky—the whirr of a fire- bird's wings are often heard, while Petrushka and Sacre both put in the odd appearance—rever- berate against what I take to be one or two Greek folk tunes. The best section of the score is a Pyrrhic war dance, ingeniously combining five/ four and seven/four times in a rhythmic orgy that almost overthrows both dancers and orchestra.
In total Antigone is an uneven work, though it offers good chances to its dancers. Svetlana Beriosova's Antigone, graceful as an olive- branch and full of bewildered pathos, is a fine creation within the ballet's terms of reference, while Michael Somes makes a sinister and hypocritical Creon, all dignity in his face yet conniving with his very shoulder-blades and every gesture of his body. David Blair and Gary Burne are magnificently well matched as the rival roaring boys, brash, stupid animals with blank, assassin faces. Less definite than these, the quiet Hzemon of Donald MacLeary—more shadowy in Cranko than Sophocles—is danced with poetic distinction. All these performances are good, as is Julia Farron's fear-ravaged Jocasta. The corps de ballet, too, almost as mobile and malleable as Robbins's Ballets: U.S.A., share the honours. Yet when all is said, Hamlet's question must be asked: What is Antigone to us or we to Antigone? Can we, like the French, find new life in an old Greek legend? Does the theme, shorn as it is of its tragic impact, mean anything to us today? I think the answer is 'yes.' 1 even think the Royal Ballet may have found itself a much-needed box-office success, which, warts and all, must restore many people's once crumbling faith in Cranko as a choreographer.
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