BALLET
Sadler's Wells Ballet. At Covent Garden.
THE new ballet Adam Zero, music by Arthur Bliss, choreography by Robert Helpmann, scenery and costumes by Roger Furse, is a distinctly ambitious work, for it is an attempt to portray in terms of ballet a conception of man's life as a never-ending succession of cycles, like the succession of seasons which changes vegetable life from spring to winter. The analogy will strike most spectators as pessimistic perhaps because it is not yet possible for the majority to regard man's life as objectively as most of us are accustomed to look upon that part of nature represented by the vegetable world. Nevertheless, this is the philosophy behind Michael Benthall's and Robert Helpmann's ballet, in which Adam Zero is represented as the head of a ballet company creating a ballet under our eyes and growing older and older as he does so, thus giving scope to a variety of scenes. From youthful vitality to senile impotence Adam pro- ceeds on his life's way, and the Three Fates (The Designer, The • Wardrobe Mistress and The Dresser) dominate every stage of his career, finally bringing it to an end. Then upon a blackboard the Stage Director adds up the pluses and minuses of Adam's life, and they cancel out, making it all amount to zero. Only Mr. Helpmann's great ingenuity saves the ballet from being pretentiously dull, but he is helped by his own talent as a mime and by Arthur Bliss's appropriate music, which sustains dramatic tension in a masterly way. The scenery and costumes by Roger Furse are also in keep- ing, so that Adam Zero achieves a certain unity. Praise is due to Jean Bedells, Julia Farron and Pamela Nye as the Three Fates and to June Brae as Adam's beloved Prima Ballerina, but I am afraid that the ballet as a whole does not make the underlying philosophy
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