Three's a crowd
BALLET CLEMENT CRISP
With the Royal, Festival and Western Theatre Ballets all going full blast last week, the dance pollen count was pretty high in London. Festival Ballet, taking refuge from the perils of Paris at the New Theatre, staged a couple of triple bills that were full of good things, notably a spanking Bourree Fantasque, and the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. One might have ex- pected that on the confines of the New's stage this venerable compound of Tartar virility and yielding Persian flesh would look like the madder moments of The Desert Song. Not so; boldly danced, it was far more compelling than the Royal Ballet's marmoreal production a couple of years ago. A lumpy and crepuscular Sylphides apart, the season was excellent, well and enthusiastically danced, and a touching tribute to the labours of the company's outgoing director, Donald Albery.
Up at Sadler's Wells, WTB provide a new ballet by Peter Darrell and two Danish imports. Darrell's Ephemeron is a suite of fluent, pretty dances, inspired by a characteris- tically ambiguous situation (Darrell is not above teasing his audience: can anyone solve the riddle in his Jeux?). The ballet looks chic —Peter Docherty's designs are up to the modish, and mod-ish, minute—and if you want to ferret out a meaning behind these gracefully restrained dances, so well set to Milhaud's tender score, you can interpret the piece as a man revisiting his .past, getting involved with memory and desire, or discovering that he is the odd man out. But whatever the message, the dances are light, craftsmanlike, enjoyable. There are no problems about understanding La Ventana, which is a beautiful series of dances by Bournonville, but there are plenty about dancing them if you are not Danish by training and able to realise all their bounding grace and stylistic nuances. WTB has a go, very bravely, and the ballet is an impor- tant acquisition to the British repertory; maybe in ten years' time we shall have dancers capable of doing it properly. There are no problems either about the other Danish acquisition, Flem- ming Flindt's Le Jeune Homme a marier, a ver- sion of lonesco's play choreographed with remarkable clarity. As with his earlier lonesco excursion, The Lesson. Flindt trans- poses these dated literary caprices to sound theatrical effect.
Le Jeune Homme, a rather denser and more complex piece which does not come off quite as well as The Lesson, is still zanily enter- taining and, ultimately, disturbing. Jacques Noel has designed it brilliantly, providing a grey monstrosity of a home for an ashen family, who look like grey parakeets in moult, and are terribly spry in their attempts to marry off the son of the family. A hectically vulgar pair of in-laws (Harry Haythorne and Bronwen Curry, both perfect) present eight brides for the young man's delectation, in a surrealist version of Swan Lake, Act 3.
Because these are Ionesco girls they are variously moustached, faceless, or, blithely,
grasshoppers. The girl who gets him—in every sense of the word—is a three-faced Hindu divinity, who subjugates the young man utterly :
end of message, end of ballet. The work is excellently done, and worth doing; wre's 'theatre' image provides exactly the right am- biance for this sort of venturesome exercise, and it should win them friends and influence audiences—which is w-ra's supreme task in these swan-ridden shores.
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