Tchaikovsky : The Sleeping Beauty
New Adventures
Sleeping Beauty Orchestra
Brett Morris (pre-recorded soundtrack)
It was inevitable that Matthew Bourne would, sooner or later, get around to the last of Tchaikovsky's great trilogy of ballets, after his original and highly successful takes on The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. The question was always just what he was going to do with this particular story, and it's easy enough to understand why he hesitated so long. In its original form, Sleeping Beauty really shouldn't be such a success. As a story, it offers absolutely nothing in the way of psychological development of its characters, and if you take the gloss of the magic off, it's hard to avoid wondering if it's really going to end happily ever after, after all. If you go back to some of the older written versions of the story, it can have a very dark side to it indeed. What Petipa and Tchaikovsky did, however, was turn it into a triumph of style over content, the apotheosis of classical ballet, magnified by a meticulously constructed and superbly crafted score. That's the kind of thing that can be done once, and once only, and Bourne, with his reputation for re-inventing the classics, was surely going to be searching for a new approach to the story.
This Aurora is a child born of desperation and magic. She's duly cursed, but with Carabosse countered, defeated and exiled by Count Lilac (a gender-switched Lilac Fairy), and apparently dying in exile, the mortals assume the curse is null and void. However, Carabosse has left a son, Caradoc, determined to carry out her intentions. Meanwhile, Aurora reaches the age of 21 (and Bourne should have stuck to 16, because his Aurora both seems and looks singularly immature for 21, at least before the curse strikes), is something of a tomboy, and is much more interested in the Royal Gamekeeper Leo than any of the hopeful young courtiers around her. When Caradoc ensures the curse is fulfilled, Leo becomes the obvious candidate for the redeeming kiss a century later, and it's another kiss, a vampire's one, courtesy of Count Lilac, that ensures he's going to live long enough to deliver. However, Caradoc pulls a Big Bad Wolf on Leo, and Aurora very nearly comes to a sticky end before matters are happily resolved.
As a re-thinking of the plot, this was fairly ingenious. It gave amplified roles to the Count and Caradoc, emphasising the basic conflict of light and dark, and it gave Aurora something resembling a genuine love interest, rather than something pulled out of thin air. It tried to make a real character of her - not altogether successfully, and I'm afraid Leo wasn't much better. Maybe it was just Dominic North, but I don't think his choreography helped; he came across as irretrievably bland. At any rate, he was seriously overshadowed by both Adam Maskell (Caradoc) and above all, Christopher Marney (Count Lilac), who is a dancer of real presence and considerable elegance, and eye-catching for all the right reasons.
However, the main point of interest was how this concept, and Bourne's choreography, were going to marry into the Tchaikovsky score. With mixed results, it has to be said. Bourne has not hesitated to edit the score quite substantially. In its complete form, it's a very long piece, comfortably over two hours without intervals (and there are usually two in a standard performance), so I was expecting it to be abbreviated. In this context, for example, the entire first scene of Act 2, the hunting party, was completely redundant, and it made perfect sense to drop it. The last act was the most altered, again because it made sense to leave out pretty well all the character dances, all those fairy-tale solos and duets which had no place here, and there was a certain amount of re-ordering of other numbers. On the whole, it wasn't as jarring as I'd feared, and the recording (specially made for the company, and with the addition of some sound effects for atmosphere) was actually pretty good.
It began very well too. Act 1 (normally known as the Prologue) stuck very close to the usual version, to the point that Bourne quite visibly referenced Petipa's choreography at times, notably in the solos for the six fairies come to bestow their gifts on the baby Aurora (a rather inspired piece of puppetry there). It was in Act 2 that the drift between the music and the choreography started to become evident. While the Garland Waltz was quite good, much of the rest seemed to be mere filling. For a while I believed that the Rose Adagio music was going to be omitted altogether which, by this time, I thought was probably a good idea. No such luck, it turned up towards the end of the act as the first proper pas de deux for Aurora and Leo, and consisted mainly of a teeth-achingly twee game of catch-me-if-you-can around a bench and a (rose) bush. This is one of the most glorious pieces of music Tchaikovsky ever wrote, and it was woefully under-served. Something similar befell the last act pas de deux too, although by this time Aurora's character did appear to have matured somewhat, and there was a stronger emotional content.
I found, in general, that when Bourne really had a story to tell, quickly and pointedly, as in Act 1 or, say, in the second scene of Act 3 (when Leo goes to wake Aurora), his inspiration is clearer, sharper, and more satisfactory. When there are 'party dances' - the Garland Waltz, the opening dance at Caradoc's Red Court - that too tends to work quite well. Other movements are less satisfactory, and really the 'traditional' pas de deux doesn't suit him at all. Still, the ingenuity is admirable, there was quite a lot of humour in the show (though some of it a little misplaced, maybe), the production was visually excellent, and the dancing generally good. I don't know if, as an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, this will have any lasting impact, but as an evening's entertainment went, I've known far worse.
[Next: 14th February]
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