BA LLET
A Russian Christmas
NOT only have the Russians invented the steam engine, the telephone and nearly everything else, it seems, from the ballet offer- ings this Yuletide, that they invented Christmas too. The insidious demands of the kiddies are currently condemning Festival Ballet to twice- daily performances of The Nutcracker—a fate I would not wish on anyone—while at Covent Garden Prokoviev's Cinderella is regularly losing her shoe and getting her Prince. Happily this last is the Ashton version and for once it is possible to derive some lasting pleasure from a Christmas show; Cinderella, although it lacks the depths of perception and emotion that mark Ashton's later full-length pieces, is 'a serviceable ballet with moments of magnificence. The mix- ture of dance spectacle and panto is cunningly done, the action shifts cleverly between the Ugly Sisters' frolics and Cinderella's flowing iamb. dons so that the audience's tears are part laughter, part sympathy; and the present cast is a vintage one. Fonteyn is in superlative form phrasing so beautifully and musically that you could cry for sheer joy, and Ashton and Help- mann are back in their original devastating and devastated drag as the flower of Ugly Sister- hood. Helprnann is the bossy one as usual; afflicted this season with a nasty facial hair problem and oeillades worthy of a bolting horse, he flaunts and prances, snatching the biggest of everything, from men to oranges. Ashton is the other poor dear, desperatel', shy ;Ind put-upon, • paddling about the stage like the oldest of ugly ducklings, and so appealing and marvellously funny that he almost becomes the heroine of the ballet and you long for the shoe to tit him.
The dancing is very fine— Ashton's not the least: 1 had forgotten his wonderful musicality and timing--with a particular prize to Merle Park as the Autumn Fairy, giving a performance of dazzling (the adjective is precise in this case) virtuosity.
New this season are the decorations by Henry Bardon and David Walker: the sets are mistily pretty, the costumes rather too fussy; curiously the original—and despised—MalcI6 designs were more stylistically correct in their feeling for the ballet than these latest confections which, after two viewings, are beginning to affect me like an overdose of marrons glares.
At the Festival Hall, nestling in its rat-maze of endless stairs and promenades, The Nut- cracker is nutcrackering on. What an evening of Maryinski rubbish the ballet is! Act 1, dominated by the party -which features those least endearing of God's creatures, child per- formers, is. something you have to sit through for the Snowflakes sequence, restored in full this season and the only serious section of the work. After that, looming like an Everest of camphor- ated candy-floss, is the Kingdom of Sweets divertissement, in which cuteness is all. Festival Ballet have revised the production this season to alleviate some of the worst moments. Costumes have been rethought, choreographic numbers have been effectively recomposed, there is even an attempt at giving the work some kind of dramatic shape, while the dancers are giving brighter and cleaner performances than hereto- fore, with Luceite Aldous and John Gilpin in fine fettle for the last pas de deux.
One other pre-Christmas opus must be men- tioned: the Australian Ballet's season of Raymonda at the New Victoria. The last of the great Maryinski classics, Raymonda was origin- ally a display piece for ballerinas, wonderful soloists, character dancers, horses, Hungarian divertissements and assorted orientals. The story is a farrago of Crusaders, ghosts, troubadours and villainous Saracens; the Glazunov score is magnificent, the Petipa choreography reputedly very fine. 1 say reputedly, because Nureyev- staging the work for the Australians—edited, trimmed, invented and generally monkeyed about with it (common practice in Russia : Nureyev is being true to his training).
Most significantly, he filleted out all the story, so that there was no motivation for the few dramatic fragments he was obliged to leave in: the result seemed sillier than the original. In its
present form this Raymonda is a poor acquisition for a young company (who need, as the early
days of the Royal Ballet prove, works that they can grow into), and the Australians lack the glassy 'assurance to bring off even mock-Petipa with any real style. The orchestra turned Glazunov's gold into lead, and the designs by Ralph Koltai and Nadine Bayliss ran the gamut from the dull to the dispiriting. The compensa- tion for all this was the variously magnificent dancing of Fonteyn and Nureyev in the leads, and the surprise appearance of the Royal Ballet's Doreen Wells, on loan to replace an indisposed Australian, who showed, once more, that she is a very fine dancer indeed.
CLEMENT CRISP
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