THE BALLET
4, Twelfth Night." At His Majesty's Theatre.
THE International Ballet, which began its season at His Majesty's Theatre last week, has at its service some accomplished dancers, an enterprising management that seeks to strike out its own line in production and first-rate scenic artists. What it needs most, if I may judge from a single programme which contained the two most important novelties, is a choreographer with imagination. For both Miss Mona Inglesby's Amoras and Twelfth Night, produced by the same lady, with choreography by Miss Andree Howard, proved to be humdrum affairs with only a modicum of dancing to a deal of not very significant, and therefore tedious, miming.
Miss Inglesby, who is also the leading dancer, moves gracefully and is technically equal to such dancing as these two pieces afford. She makes a brave and swaggering Viola, but cannot give us (how could she?) the womanly wit. To play Shakespeare's comedy, more or less as it stands, in dumb-crambo fashion is an obvious mistake. The thing must be recreated in the new medium, or the choreo- grapher must devise a fantasia upon the original as Mr. Helpmann did in Hamlet. Even the downs, who ought to lend themselves readily to mime and dance, fail ; for all that, Miss Taralcanova is a sprightly Maria and Mr. Leslie French a lively Feste. The others might do well enough in an impromptu charade, but they are not of the calibre for the house that Tree built. As to Mr. Harold Turner, one of our most brilliant dancers, whom I looked forward to seeing again, he is condemned to play in Amoras a part without character, and does it with a natural lack of conviction. Postscript.—Let it be recorded that on Sunday last a B.B.C. announcer informed the public that Mr. Boyd Neel's orchestra would play Vaughan Williams's "Fantasia on a theme of Tah-lee "- presumably a French contemporary of Uccello I
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
Previous page
