BALLET
Ballet Workshop. (Mercury.) PETER DARRELL'S new work, Les Chimeres, now being performed at the Ballet Workshop; is an extremely pleasant little vignette. A simple theme—hunters who come across chimeres playing in a forest and ensnare them—it shows Darrell to be a choreographer who under- stands the limitations imposed upon him by the theatre's smallness ; who refreshingly tells his story in clear terms of the dance without recourse to tiresome programme notes ; and who, together with his composer and designer, is able to achieve a good degree of homo- geneity. The music by Michael Hobson seems to me to be excellently suited to the idea, and Douglas Smith's forest set creates just the right effect without any self-conscious effort at " modernism." Darrell's choreography grows quite happily out of the mood he wishes to create, but I do think it would be an improvement if the Pas-de-deux between the leading hunter, Esteban Cerda, and the captive chimere—delightfully danced by Noreen Sopwith—were cut a little ; also if the climax of the ballet, when the hunter is strangled by the very rope which binds his prisoner, were more forcibly
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