Trudi Schoop and her Comic . Ballet. At the Embassy
STAGE AND SCREEN The Ballet
Theatre, Swiss Cottage • " CHARADES," word of ill-omen in a theatre-manager's ear, was the one that came to the lips when the curtain rose and displayed Miss Trudi Schoop's company perusing the adver- tisement columns of the Morning Post. They might have been members of a Christmas party staying in one of those houses where there is a large chest filled with old do' of every fashion, sex and social grade for use in impromptu theatribals. And since the women outnumber the men in the party, some of them have to don travesty to supply the requisite number of male characters. This entertainment is, in fact, a very simple affair, unsophisticated, without chic but also without pretentiousness. It is no show for the balletomanes.
Second thoughts and further experience corrected the first impression. These Swiss dancers have nothing aristocratic in their style ; their art is middle-class, with more than a touch of peasantry. One expected at any moment an out- burst of yodelling. But why should the middle-class be wholly despicable ? It covers, if we are not too snobbish to admit it, a large proportion of us ; in Switzerland, I imagine, the great majority of the nation. It is the middle-class that is here satirised, and it surely has its place in the Theatre, even in the holy precincts of the Ballet. It may be that that place is rightly in the music-hall or Revue, and the pieces pre- sented by Miss Trudi Schoop consist of little sketches some- what loosely strung together by a connecting thread of story. Some of them are very funny, and I defy anyone who has any gusto left to refrain from laughing at Miss Meta Krahn's incompetent chorus-girl with an eye on the " lead." Like Miss Liy, Mr. Ulbrieht and Miss Schoop herself, Miss Krahn has ghat may be called without offence the caricature of a face. Their 'features arc the true clown's, blanks upon which may be drawn the parodied lineaments of individual characters.
But funny faces arc not enough, and it is too rarely that the company so successfully creates an atmosphere like that of the seedy cabaret, the revivalists' meeting, or the preposterous Sporiverein with its strutting standard-bearer and gushing maidens to crown the grotesque athletic paladins. No one who has ever visited one of those night-cafes, which used to abound in Paris and in Berlin and, for all I know, in Berne, can fail to have recognised the truthful picture of dreary enjoyment centred upon a raddled singer and a pseudo- Eastern stomach-dancer. Perhaps other things were as truthful ; for example, the bourgeois wedding-group, but if so, too much was of merely parochial interest. Swiss jokes are for the Swiss, and most of the scenes went on too long. The company needs a Cochran to bring down the curtain directly the point is made.
The dancing, in so far as there is real dancing, is mostly based upon ballroom movements. The rest is miming, too much confined to the face, but sometimes breaking into grotesque contortions. The disadvantage of this kind of ballet is that it can achieve no real sense of climax. The possibilities of movement and grouping are too quickly exhausted. This is the justification of the classical style, that it can, by the excitement of physical tension, arouse and sustain an emotional reaction in the spectator. Even there the dance is limited, and when the attempt is made to express in dancing the movement of great music, the music soon outstrips the earthbound ballcrines and leaves them impotently aspiring to an energy beyond their physical powers.
That is why music for ballet should not be too good, but it is no reason why it should be bad. Tchaikovsky achieved the golden mean, and lately we have been shown at Sadler's Wells the true utility of Liszt. The music used by Miss Trudi Schoop is poor, not because it is played on two pianofortes—it is well played—nor because it is in a popular style with borrowings, unless I urn mistaken, from familiar musical-comedy tunes, but because it is rarely more than an insignificant accompani- ment. It never inspires the action. But, when all is said and • done, the visitor to the Embassy Theatre who is prepared to enjoy himself without obsessions about the importance of Ballet's earnestness will have a good laugh for his money, even
if he has also an occasional yawn. DVNELEY HUSSEY.
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