Ballet
Stripping assets
Robin Young
The Royal Ballet have had quite a welter of innovations and revivals since last I wrote, In the touring New .Group's programmes Vyvyan Lorrayne had scarcely got up from her Dunlopillo after an afternoon's intimacy with Barry McGrath in Ashton's revamped Siesta than they were at it again: this time In a Summer Garden set to music by Delius.
On this occasion Lorrayne played a more mature woman — passionate rather than sensuous — and the change suited her. McGrath, however, was done up to look like a very dirty dago indeed. After stripping Lorrayne down to her provocatively strait-laced undies, he attempted to present his visiting card. Ronald Hynd, the choreographer, obviously believes all he has ever read about commercial travellers. The piece is wellmade, however, and generally creates and holds its atmosphere well.
Kenneth MacMillan's new work The Poltroon was altogether more disquieting. This version of commedia dell'arte has Pierrot (Donald MacLeary) turn Boston Strangler on Columbine (Brenda Last), and having disposed of her, he deals various forms of violent death on all the other characters who have abused him and enjoyed her.
There is, I suspect, a feeling that the touring Group's pleasantries, such as Patineurs, Les Rendezvous, Pineapple Poll and Grand Tour: which are its programmes' mainstay and principal strength) must be balanced with excursions into the unpleasant. It does not seem a well-advised policy to me.
At the Opera House itself we had a powerful programme in tribute to Stravinsky (rich in ritual with Rite of Spring and Les Noces), which was especially welcome for the revival of The Firebird. Antoinette Sibley gave rather more fire than bird in her impersonation, but the whole thing worked really rather well, though the Enchanted Princesses' business with the apples looked not unlike a coy commercial for the Apple Marketing Board. The backcloth for the wedding scene, designed by Natalia Gontcharova in 1926, comes up like one of this year's best and brightest Christmas cards.
They have tidied up Swan Lake, so that, Covent Garden now has a version much like that which the old touring company used. Act 4 is an improvement — romantic and sufficiently atmospheric not to need a gauze curtain. Act 3 still makes little sense. Its whole is still less than the sum of its rather arbitrarily chosen parts. But generally the revisions which have been rejected were the right ones to go, and some improvements are sensibly retained.
Finally a revival of Job for Vaughan Williams's centenary — a Masque for Dancing choreographed in a most craftsmanlike manner by Ninette de Valois to enact the message of Blake's engravings. The designs by John Piper are true to the original inspiration, and the piece was well-performed with Kerrison Cooke taking the old Dolin-Helpmann rOle as Satan with vigour and Donald McLeary as Elihu. This very English religious mimicry, however, sat most uncomfortably between Tetley's Laborintus, diminished by Nureyev's absence, and Raymonda Act 3, in which Margot Fonteyn added style and subtraced pace.
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