Ballet
Royal blues
Robin Young
There are eight or nine choreographic versions of el Amor Brujo, and I have seen most of them. None has been a success. No choreographer of the top flight has ever tackled the task, despite the temptation of the ravishing Music. I would be surprised if many of the rival versions were quite as weak as the latest, which Peter Wright has contributed to the repertoire of the Royal Ballet's touring company.
It got its London premiere as the centre-piece of the first-night triple bill in the company's three and a half week season at Sadler's Wells, but woefully failed to justify its place between two firmly established Ashton favourites, The Dream and Facade.
Despite de Falla's quintessentially Spanish music, Wright's chosen idiom is off-the-shelf sub-classicism — twirls on the points and lugubrious walks and stretches around the stage which are astoundingly irrelevant to the score and devoid of creative movement.
For some reason the sister (June Highwood) replaces the nominal heroine not just for a key moment, but almost throughout the ballet, annexing to herself even the ritual fire dance which leaves Vyvyan Lorrayne's Candelas stubbornly unkindled in the general murk.
And 'murk' I mean. Stefanos Lazaridis's designs are dreadfully depressing. Bits of droopy knitting keep coming down over a shapeless set, and the gipsies wear sackcloth and old carpets. The smoke screen (inevitable with ghosts) blots out everything and comes as real relief.
The Ashton ballets both had star performances from Alexander Grant, doubly welcome on a first night when there was remarkably little star quality on show. The Dream brought a lot of new faces on to a cramped and crowded stage where they had to pick their way around rather carefully. This probably explained Alain Dubreuil's apparent inhibitions as Oberon, and some ragged work among the corps de ballet. The lovers (Brenda Last and Peter O'Brien, June Highwood and Murray Kilgour) did well with their humour against the restrictions of the stage: at one moment Last's pursuit of her man had her dancing with her foot almost in the faces of the other couple lying on the ground. Marion Tait's Titania was much more Queen than Fairy — sharp, spiky, angular and overemphatic. Nor is David Morse built to be Puck. For a fairy, I would choose Julie Lincoln's Peaseblossom.
In Facade there was only Margaret Barbieri's debutante to set beside Grant's dago — all the cast's top strength in one number. Lois Strike was disappointingly off form and balance in the Polka, Christine Aitken a rather pallid Milkmaid, and while David Morse and Peter O'Brien caught some of the humour of Popular Song I think you would expect a more closely synchronised song-and-dance act at, say, the London Palladium.
Star-gazing balletomanes got compensation, however, from the world of books. Margot Fonteyn's autobiography (W. H. Allen £3.95) is written with the fluency which distinguishes her dancing ("writing's easy," she says frankly) and shows a woman of cool intelligence and warm humour, without revealing more than one would expect of an essentially private personality.
A second book Ballerina, edited
• by Clement Crisp (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6) builds a lot of genuine information as well as a wealth of suitable illustration into a tribute to Nadia Nerina, one of the many great dancers who has had to be content to blossom in Fonteyn's shadow.
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