Ballet
Low profile
Robin Young
You pay a lot of money to get into the Royal Opera House. It does not follow that you necessarily see very much. A diminutive American next to me at a revival of Anastasia (not improved) gave up the unequal struggle to see anything at all, and stared gloomily at his knees throughout the performance. If I have not mentioned this risk before it is because I am 6 feet 41/2 inches and normally it is the people behind me who suffer. Yet in the orchestra stalls (balcony stalls are the better bet) even I am not safe.
On the last day of January I found myself behind a big fellow with a bouffant hair style, and all I saw of Agon was David Ashmole and Wayne Eagling standing at the extreme corners of the stage clapping for the Bransle de Poitou. Somewhere about where the hulking brute's nose would be, Laura Connor was dancing. Well, I hope. For paying customers £4.50 is a lot to punt on the chance of seeing
dancers, and the orchestra is not so hot that you would want to pay fancy prices to hear them play.
I switched seats with my wife for Hans van Manen's Four Schumann Pieces. She likes chamber music anyway, and I am glad to say she enjoyed the Alberni String Quartet's performance, if nothing else. Van Manen's ballet is built for and around Anthony Dowell, who is seldom off stage, even though for most of the second movement he is completely motionless.
There is a lot of slow movement. Dowell's qualities which seem to impress Van Manen most are his cool level-headedness, his reserves of confidence and control, though at the end the dancer has some tripping tours of the stage which are taken at bewildering pace. The ballet comes to life in the third movement, in a succession of duets with Jennifer Penney, Lesley Collier and Eagling, and in the final rondo, but for much of the rest of the time the dance is a pale, innocuous accompaniment to the music.
After that my view was obstructed again for La Bayadere, but even so I saw enough to know that the paeans of praise heaped on the 'corps de ballet afterwards were no more deserved than usual. The first girl out on to the ramp was only the most insecure. Several others looked decidedly rickety, and their feet returning to base once they were all on stage too oftbn sounded like a shower of rain.
Adam Darius's new ballet Marilyn, at the Arts Theatre Club, is as crudely exploitative as the film Sex Symbol, but whereas the filmmakers pretend that any resemblance in their story to Marilyn Monroe's is entirely unintentional, Darious commits the possibly even greater hypocrisy of wrapping his stuff up in the sort of programmatic guff about the actress that would make decent people want to honk. Particularly grotesque is some doggerel verse by the choreographer entitled 'The Madonna Whore,' but I would only make you squirm if I quoted it.
Familiar facets of Monroe's life are presented in as glib and melodramatic a way as possible. ChrissY Roberts, as the mad mother, shows she might have a talent for comedy. Tessa Bill-Yeald has little chance to show that Marilyn filled the dress from Seven Year Itch with anything more than a shape. She picks up a piece of film to the strain of 'Tara's Theme' (ambition) and does brisk physical jerks on stage (application). And so on. She strikes the famous calendar pose (in her dress, incongruously, though four blokes who come on later, to bother her, wear nothing but executioners' hoods, gloves and belts).
The argument which the ballet presents — with all the sophistication of a mummers' play and none of the impact — is that Bobby Kennedy murdered Marilyn after she had an affair with his brother the President. At the end the hooded figures returned to swing Marilyn's corpse about to the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic. Safely oscured under one of the hoods, I suppose, was Mr Darius.
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