Ballet
Tchaik
By CLIVE BARNES
WHAT would ballet in Britain be like if Tchaikovsky had never lived? We could hardly have invented him; after thirty-two years of struggle we have yet to come up with one significant ballet score of our own, with the possible excep- tion of Britten's Prince of the Pagodas. How- ever, Tchaikovsky was, and British ballet is. The other day I calculated that I had heard the three Tchaikovsky full-length ballet scores altogether about a thousand times and spent almost exactly 1 per cent. of my entire life listening to Tchai- kovsky ballet music. Then, last week (there is no Christmas amnesty for ballet critics), I notched up another three Tchaikovsky hearings: two performances of The Nutcracker at the Festival Hall, and at Covent Garden what was apparently the 364th performance of The Sleep- ing Beauty to be given there since the war.
Festival Ballet's version of The Nutcracker has by now cracked a lot of Christmas nuts, but it remains in surprisingly serviceable condition. The choreography by David Lichine is poor to medium, but the production as a whole, with its elegantly spectacular scenery and costumes by Alexandre Benois, has the authentic glamour and glitter. Mice scamper around in battle for- mation, locked in mortal combat with a troop of toy soldiers, a Christmas tree grows into a forty-foot pine, a room is transformed into a forest of snow and the heroine enters in an invisibly propelled walnut shell.
In this kind of spectacle dancing must take second place, but both of the casts I saw went to it with a will. Dianne Richards and Belinda Wright make attractive Sugar-Plum Fairies, although in Wright's performance I find rather too much sugar to too little plum. Richards's partner, a Canadian newcomer David Adams, is a splendid, forceful dancer, with that refresh- ing classic lumberjack style that always seems specifically transatlantic. John Gilpin, now re- turned to Festival Ballet after a year's absence, partners Wright with easy gallantry and dances with a certain distinction. Yet this is not a ballet for grown-up dancers, and all their efforts are surpassed by the children, notably Mary Williams acting the little girl Clara with the formidable mixture of technique and natural- ness that only children can command.
The Covent Garden Sleeping Beauty tended • to snore gently with a sort of post-prandial doziness that afflicted company and orchestra alike. It was probably too soon after Christmas, and in any case Emanuel Young is not the con- ductor to wake up an orchestra. But Antoinette Sibley and John Gilpin, unaffected by their sur- roundings, picked their way through the zombies to make wonderfully assured Covent Garden debuts as Aurora and the Prince. Sibley, looking newly scrubbed and shining with happi- ness, showed a musicality and instinctive sense of line that only Fonteyn can equal among British dancers. Her partnership with Gilpin was made in heaven, for they have almost precisely the same qualities and limitations; both accomp- lished actors, they fail to get inside a character, but are dazzling at the externals of a role. This extrovert approach can be entirely satisfying, as indeed it was on this occasion.
Gilpin's characterisation of the Prince, ob- viously the product of careful thought rather than carefree instinct, was by and large the best Covent Garden has ever seen. Aristocratic fop, romantic poet, ardent lover and proud hus- band, he ran through the development of the role like a professor giving an inspired lecture on the uses of mimetic gesture.
Then, having demonstrated how to act, he cut loose in the one passage that gives an opportunity for dancing and whirled through his solo as if determined to show those Covent Garden lay- abouts how to dance. There may have been a touch of defiance in it. After an unfortunate year with the Royal Ballet, he was returning across the river to his ancestral home at the Festival Hall. It perhaps seemed an apt moment to show that he was, in his own way, irreplace- able.
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