BALLET
"Lac des Cygnes." At Sadler's Wells.
THE ballet, so far undiminished in essential strength by the calls of military service, returned to Sadler's Wells on Monday
with a complete performance of Tchaikovsky's Le Lac des Cygnes. Only the apparent ease with which the company shoulders such an undertaking prevents one from exclaiming at the wonder of it. It is not, perhaps, sufficiently appreciated that the performance of such elaborate pieces as this and The Sleeping Princess are comparable with that of an opera by Meyerbeer, calling for consummate technique in the principal actors and the smooth staging of a complicated spectacle. And what we make nowadays of an opera by Meyerbeer, even at a theatre with the traditions and resources of Covent Garden, is within the m:mory of opera-goers.
The odd thing is that the British public, which has never since the days of Addison and Johnson been able to swallow the conventions of opera, has taken to gulping down the whole apparatus of the Romantic Ballet without so much as a pre- liminary grimace. The other night the audience sat through all the ritual of mime with which the Princess Mother signifies her wish that the Prince Siegfried would drink less and settle down, with a rapt attention that would have done justice to the finest delivery of Hamlet's soliloquies. All these pre- liminaries are very tedious, and not really necessary to the drama. They were necessary in the Russian Imperial Theatre, no doubt, in order to fill in the time before the Court arrived for the second act, where the action proper begins. I am unorthodox enough to regret also that the danced version (no doubt apocryphal) of the Swan Princess's first entry is not used instead of the mime which simply wastes a first-rate piece of dance-music.
Miss Fonteyn gave a wonderfully subtle performance of the dual parts of Odette and Odile—the one yielding tenderness and pathos, the other all hard glitter and garnets. I am not sure, indeed, that she did not overdo the contrast, making Odile so much the Worst Woman in Homburg, or wherever it is, that she is hardly recognisable as possessing the outward form of the gentle Odette. Her dancing has never had the hard, mechanical brilliance of the virtuoso ballerina, and on the technical side her performance was less brilliant than usual. But with such a sure command of poetic expression, she can afford for once not to be quite on the top of her form. Mr. Helpmann supported her to perfection, and danced his solos with a lithe grace and great resilience. The numerous inci- dental solos were all capably—some of them most brilliantly— performed. I wish it were possible to say as much of the orchestra, which sounded as if the wind had a grudge against the strings and was determined either to drown them or put them out of tune.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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