BALLET
The Sadler's Wells Company THE Sadler's Wells Ballet have returned to London, not to their own home but to the New Theatre, which is a more convenient site in these days of darkness and difficult travel.
Performances are given every afternoon and on Saturdays the programme is repeated at a second house. There are, therefore, at present three theatres devoted to ballet, the successful venture at the Arts Theatre having reduplicated itself at the Ambassadors. The programme I saw last week contained three of Frederick Ashton's ballets, Harlequin in the Street, Dante Sonata and the new version of Facade. These made an excellent entertainment, displaying the range and variety of the choreographer's invention. The first is a refined and artificial comedy admirably suited to the delicate wit of Francois Couperin's music. Mr. Carter has filled out, if one may use the expression of so slender a figure, his portrait of Harlequin and gives a performance that can be set beside Idzikowski's in Carnaval. It has the same gay and naughty freshness, though here there are only occasional touches of sentiment. But though Harlequin's pranks are the central core of the piece, they are not its sole ingredient. Else it would be mere farce. Mr. Somes and Miss Brae give to the lovers an elegance and a restrained passion that set one thinking of Mirabell and Millamant, and lift the ballet on to the plane of true comedy.
Dante Sonata is Mr. Ashton's most ambitious creation, and it is almost wholly successful. At its best moments it attains to a degree of tragic terror and pity rare in ballet. There are certain weak patches in the composition of the ensembles, when the dancers are set to rush about the stage without any particular design or significance in their movements. These bits of padding, that fill in long passages of music working up to a climax, are the price that has to be paid for taking a ready-made sym- phonic work for use as a ballet. In thes passages the imagination of the choreographer lapses for a while, and he falls back upon movement for its own sake, just as a composer, in default of ideas, fills in his symphonic design with a series of sequential figures that really have no meaning. These passages are rare, but they are not unimportant, for, coming as they do at points where a climax is being worked up, they allow the dramatic tension to slacken just at the point where it should be tightened.
If these passages could be improved, possibly by some excisions in the score—for the real trouble is that the amount of music puts too great a strain upon the choreography—Dante Sonata would be a great masterpiece. It has a rare imagination in movement, setting and feeling. Its theme is of the most sublime and it does not topple into the ridiculous. There was, indeed, one point where, in the earlier performances, Mr. Somes and Miss Fon- tcyn, re-united after a terrible ordeal, did fail to invest their gestures with the right significance. Their meeting then suggested the coy and arch bashfulness of adolescence. Now they give to those same gestures the tenderness and shame, which was obviously always intended, and the little scene has become in- 'tensely moving. And, as a sort of bonus, there is thrown in the extraordinary cleverness with which Flaxman's illustrations have been realised in movement, and to have embodied in the round those bare, severe outlines without losing all resemblance to the original is no mean feat.
Mr. Helpmann's performance in this ballet is as terrifying as ever in its serpentine contortions. He achieves his powerful effect not by the mere making of damnable faces but by the writhing of every muscle in his frame. But the ballet depends, more than most, upon the whole company rather than upon individual dancers, and it is in the big ensembles, despite the lapses already noted, that the choreographer's skill and imagination show most clearly. The lighting contributes a great deal to the effect, and unfortunately the changes of illumination were not handled with the smoothness and precision. that is needed.
I had not seen the new version of Facade, produced at Sadler's Wells last year. There are two new dances, and Mr. John Armstrong has provided new scenery and costumes. Excepting the dresses for the young ladies who dance the Valse, I cannot agree that any of the innovations is an improvement. The new dances are a "Nocturne Peruvienne " for Mr. Ashton, which is a not particularly distinguished pastiche of " Spanish " movements, and a " Fox Trot," which satirises the vulgarity of the behaviour and costumes of the Bright Young Things of fifteen years ago. The "Fox Trot" would he well enough in one of Mr. Farjeon's revues, but it has too knockabout an air in these surroundings. Mr. Armstrong's new scenery has none of the delightful incon-
sequence of the original, in which something apposite to every one of the dances in the divertissement was embodied in the scene. In place of that witty evocation of "everywhere," we are given a suburban setting, with a high-busted young female smelling a rose at hen window, and some underclothes (male and female) dancing on a washing-line. The original Facade needed no improvement, and it certainly did not deserve to have its excellence hidden behind this new false front.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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