Ballet
Inviting Criticism
By CLIVE BARNES
You would need to be stone-blind not to see the basic importance of The, Invitation, and it may even mark a certain belatedly new departure for the Royal Ballet. MacMillan's deliberate selection of an hysterically dramatic theme is welcome, and this is the first dance-drama ever produced by the Royal Ballet in a style seem- ingly derived from that great and neglected British choreographer of the Thirties, Antony Tudor. Furthermore, the performance given to The In is unquestionably awe-inspiring, with its dancers practically dissolved into the ballet, and carrying conviction like an act of faith. As the girl ravished from innocence to sterile resignation, Lynn Seymour gives a per- formance as astounding in its more limited way as Ulanova's Juliet or Fonteyn's Ondine. The whole work has a weight, depth and (less fortu- nately) length unusual in ballet, and yet I still find myself carping at the result. Why?
Is art a question of morality, or can we admire the shadow and forget the substance that cast it? It is all very fine to say that The II:vita:Hon treats sex 'without romantic falsification,' but, to my mind, it also treats it with a cynical fal- sification that is far nastier. The ballet (set in Edwardiana, probably to give it a sense of 'atmosphere') shows society in fast-crumbling decay, and it is possible that MacMillan is trying to look 'unsentimentally' at the falling moral standards of our time. Into a world of smutty juvenile prurience and hypocritical adult lascivi- ousness come two young innocents; the girl is raped into feminine submission, while the boy is seduced into masculine insensitivity, and the ballet's copious copulation is apparently enjoyed by no one. Now moral standards may fall, and moral standards may rise, but surely physical love-making is not so consistently distressing. Supposing perhaps we were all reduced to animal functions, not all of us would be denied animal .pleasures--and yet such a denial is inherently the least inviting aspect of The Invitation.
Even if I were able to see The Invitation'as a blameless, fearless moral tract ('Repent, repent, the Kingdom of Freud is at hand!), I would, and this is vital, still think it a ballet only good in part. Constructionally and dramatically it has gaping flaws only bridged by the compelling performance of Miss Seymour and her co- illusionists conspiring to persuade us that the work is better than it is. The mixture of realism and symbolism (with naked statues representing the facts of life, and a troupe of acrobats called in apparently to allegorise sexual cavortings) is muddled, while the narrative-line often wavers unconvincingly. MacMillan's choreography here comes in all qualities. His work for Seymour throughout has a completely articulate expressiveness he has never before achieved, except perhaps briefly in the flowing cadences of Le Baiser de la Fee. Seymour may star in this vehicle, but MacMillan built it, and choreographically the whole role is marvellously observed. Here MacMillan shows the same skill in catching reality in movement that a few of our playwrights have shown in capturing dramatically heightened natural speech. His scene of the girl's rape by the rogue-husband (finely played by Desmond Doyle with a pen- cilled moustache and immobile sensuality) has an unlikely beauty, crystalline in its imagery and no more repulsive in its associations than, say, one of Shakespeare's poetic murders. The two love-duets for the girl and the young boy (Christopher Gable dancing with a wonderfully assured lack of assurance) are exquisite and tender, and the whole scene depicting the children's ball is so sensitively choreographed and produced that one can overlook its dramatic implausibility.
The rest of the choreography is at an appre- ciably lower level, and the brittle, neo-classical divertissement for those extraneous status-sym- bols, the Acrobats, shows a banal poverty to which MacMillan has never before been reduced. The well-varied music by Matyas Seiber is arresting, danceable and oddly appealing—his tragic death in a road accident just after com- pleting the score is now doubly mourned. The semi-abstract and occasionally beautiful settings and Edwardian costumes by Nicholas Georgiadis produce a diversity of styles, in which even Henry Moore and Cecil Beaton are not for- gotten.
Having now said most of what I want to say, I realise I have given no idea of how stimulating and disturbing a ballet this is. Perhaps I have been mistaken in writing about it as though works like The Invitation turned up every week of the month. Its very nature invites criticism, and possibly I have laid too much stress on its shortcomings, with too little on its originality. It needs simplicity (think of Tudor's Lilac Gar- den!), yet it is a ballet to be seen.
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