Ballet
The First Classics
By CLIVE BARNES THE other day a Canad- ian man of the theatre, Mr. Mayor Moore, spoke his mind about the Royal Ballet. On a Toronto radio programme he de- plored the company's 'artistic homosexuality.' 'Quelle delicatesser But it seems that, despite his queer turn of phrase, Mr. Moore was apparently concerned with the com- pany's alleged abandonment of dramatic values and concentration upon decor. His point is at once defensible and debatable.
North Americans, used to more Spartan stages, frequently dole out cautious praise to Royal Bal- let decors that are considered unequivocally hideous by most Covent Garden habitues. Per- sonally I would find it difficult to name even six ballets in the repertory which show the trend towards decadently sumptuous finery that American observers are constantly detecting. On the question of dramatic values, Mr. Moore cuts nearer the bone. Two of the productions shown in Toronto—The Sleeping Beauty and, God help Canada, Swan Lake—are in their details about as dramatically convincing as pier-end pierrots (the third, the company's long-overdue new pro- duction of Giselle, has yet to be seen in London).
Certainly we have not yet shown that we can present nineteenth-century ballets with the sense and sensibility of the Danes and the Russians at their best. (Not that the Russians are infallible, for the Bolshoi Swan Lake was, if any- thing, an even murkier puddle than our own.) Unfortunately loose talk about dramatic values in ballet can easily lead to the false assumption that a ballet is nothing but a play manqué, a drama castrated of speech. Drama in ballet has its own code-books and the choreographer's idiom is of necessity different from the playwright's. The distinction can be nicely taken by considering Frederick Ashton's recent full-length ballets, Ondine, La Fille Mal Gardee and Les Deux Pigeons. Both sections of the Royal Ballet are in Joint residence at Covent Garden; this has given an unusual opportunity to see these three ballets as a group, and the revival the other week of On- dine and La Fille emphasised the family likeness of the last of the triad, Les Deux Pigeons. Everything and anything is the business of the Playwright. To be sure he may heighten speech, contract situations, and give only the illusion of r!ality, but we go to him with ears cocked for the ring of truth. In a broad sense the choreographer is snapping away at the same target from a very different vantage point. A play can particularise with the precision of speech, and as it weaves its drama, we enjoy a shiver of recognition. Ballet, on the other hand, palisaded by conventions and fringed with impossibilities, is at its strongest when it is being much more general in its com- ments. The choreographer may try to steal the playwright's thunder; someone once made a ballet out of A Streetcar Named Desire. It was, to speak mildly, ill-advised.
Ashton by-passes all pretence of verismo, and trades in symbolism and allegory. His dramatic values are those of the myth, and the actual drama of his choreography is often as non- specific as that found in music. In Ondine he illuminates the old Romantic saga of a man breathlessly chasing the unattainable; in Les Deux Pigeons—the first work that he has frankly called 'an allegory' on the programme—he takes the La Fontaine fable as a starting-point for a homely theme of young lovers growing older and wiser.
Ballet shows types, not individuals, although it can sometimes arrange for the designer to put the types into fancy dress so that they may, to a casual glance, simulate individuals. Within this convention, Ashton produces some telling characterisations in each of these ballets. Some- one, in a memorably happy phrase, has called Ondine a 'concerto for Fonteyn,' and certainly Ondine herself is the only three-dimensional character in the ballet. Les Deux Pigeons runs to only two fully drawn characters, and even La Fille, the most naturalistic of the group, restricts itself to four. Some choreographers try to delineate every character in a ballet. Here Ash- ton, rather than loading his canvas with a Frith- like devotion to irrelevant detail, seems to have decided to take one or two fully developed portraits and to place them against an impressionistic background of dancing.
This cavalier disregard of the honoured precepts of the old ballet-masters is at first unnerving. We are so used to ballets in which every picture tries to tell a story, and which at a pinch could be criticised against the same yard- stick one would apply to a play, that we are bound to be disturbed when Ashton, in these ballets, finally breaks through to an inspired mixture of realism and fantay that is impossible to anything but dancing. Many of us murmur pointlessly: 'But the gipsies aren't much like gipsies' or 'What have ondines to do with Life?'
In these three ballets it seems to me that Ash- ton has found a new mastery (not least in their wonderfully rich dance invention), and has prob- ably laid down the first classics of British ballet, much as Britten, it seems, has produced the first classic British operas. For all this, the Royal Ballet needs to proceed with caution. To return, for a moment, to Mr. Moore and his 'artistic homosexuality,' there is here, I think, a definite hint of possible future sterility. No one, I hope, will •now defend the old idea that ballet is an equal collaboration of choreography, music and design, but the claims of the two junior partners should not , be completely disregarded. The tepidly eclectic music of Henze's Ondine and the undemandingly pretty scores of La Fille and Les Deux Pigeons are not really good enough and, while Jacques Dupont's designs for Les Deux Pigeons are effectively evocative, Lila di Nobili's smudgy backcloths for Ondine and the curious banality of Osbert Lancaster's work for La Fille show that whatever merits British ballet has. an eye for decor is not at present among them.
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