Ballet
Strip Cartoon
By CLIVE BARNES
THE other day Georg Solti said the Covent Garden Opera House needed a rehearsal stage like a loaf of bread. On that reckoning the Edinburgh Fes- tival needs an opera house like a drink of water. The opera itself is crowded into the King's Theatre as is tradition. Previously the ballet has been found a pied-a-terre in the Empire Theatre. This variety theatre was almost hydro- cephalic--its bigheaded auditorium being stuck awkwardly on a thin spindle-shanked stage. Since the last Edinburgh Festival the theatre has been shot (at least I think they said 'shot') leaving the ballet nowhere to go.
In the circumstances it would have been understandable if Lord Harewood and his ad- visers had said to Terpsichore: 'Never dance on my doorstep again.' Instead they have imported a ballet-in-the-round from Belgium and put it down in an architecturally hotted-up Ice Rink at M urrayfield.
This entertainment devised by Maurice Mart is The Four Sons of Aymon. Originally produced in the Cirque Royale in Brussels a couple of years ago, it is based on a play of the same name by Henri Closson which won wide popularity in Belgium during the German occu- pation. The Four Sons is a tenth-century Belgian legend set in the times of Charlemagne, whose four heroes rise in opposition to Charlemagne after one of them has killed the Emperor's
nephew. Vestiges of this old play are retained in the shape of two chorus-like figures, one repre- senting the Common Man, the other being called quite explicitly 'The Storyteller.' The music, arranged by Fernand Schirren, is a hotch-potch of noises, including Renaissance court music, a per- cussion band and musique concrete.
The ballet makes what capital it can out of its circus-style presentation and Mart's produc- tion is always slick. Unfortunately the doggedly classical choreography by Janine Charrat and Mart himself runs from the mediocre to the banal, and this by itself could prevent it from any very serious consideration, even as a piece of what Bejart likes to call 'total theatre.' (I suspect that 'total theatre' as used by most of its present- day adherents can be summed up as 'ballet with sub-titles.') Medieval ladies on points always seem to savour of the revue and often Bejares Four Sons of Aymon has more than a hint of the Folies Bergere about it. Every now and then I found myself looking round expectantly for nudes, and on one occasion I was only dis- appointed in the nick of time.
Primarily it is a children's entertainment, a cross between a comic and a strip cartoon, and once or twice (twice to be precise) Wjart stages a fine coup de thecitre. The climax of the first part is splendid, when a great mechanical horse suddenly whizzes into the midst of a battle and carries off the four brothers. The other really effective moment comes when the principal boy (for one tends to think in pantomime terms) is beset with dreams of monsters. Designed by belle Roustan, these creeping, crawling ob- scenities are really worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. With Mart's other devices, such as a chess-game played with life-sized chessmen, I was less fascinated, even though to be fair the pro- duction had an air of fantasy and even superman heroism that was more than merely the sum of its oddly disparate parts. If, by any chance, how- ever, the Festival intends to use the Ice Rink for ballet another year, it might like to consider bringing a concert party of dancers from the Bolshoi. It would honestly be of more interest to British balletgoers.
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