But for once, at Tuesday’s premiere of William Tuckett’s new production, The Soldier’s Tale, entering at a high level produced a thrill: a stunning view of the ingenious Lez Brotherston’s set. This is a theatre within a theatre — a run-down old music hall in meticulous detail. A stage with painted drop curtains; threadbare drapes and flyblown mirrors; dulled gilt and faded plush; little balconies; a dressing room; candle-lit tables for privileged customers; banks of gold, shell-encased footlights. And below all this, a red-curtained orchestra pit housing the seven musicians, under Richard Bernas’s baton, to play Stravinsky’s perky, jazzy gypsy-band score for this seldom-staged theatre piece.
They played it very well, too; but, that apart, Brotherston carried most of the evening’s honours. Based on a Russian folk story, and originally created for touring when Stravinsky was living in Switzerland in 1918, The Soldier’s Tale — about a soldier’s encounters with the devil in disguise — has a libretto by the Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, which Tuckett uses in a translation by Paul Griffiths. Will Kemp (best known as the Matthew Bourne dance actor) plays the Narrator, but Tuckett has given the other roles a big share of the speech, too, and the effect of this — despite the performers being Adam Cooper, Zenaida Yanowsky and Matthew Hart — is often tedious and banal.
Hart, who was so splendid in the mime-dance part of Toad in Tuckett’s delightful The Wind in the Willows, is unfortunately saddled with boring dialogue as the Devil in various tiresome guises — old man, old woman — and only really makes an impact at the end, when he is all hairy, with cloven hooves. Yanowsky, as the princess whom the soldier mira- culously cures of illness, raises the only laughs of the evening by vamping madly on pointe with a long cigarette-holder and a vacuous grin; but the farce is out of keeping. Tuckett muddles the tone of what is a curious work to begin with.
The dance is hardly memorable: a few snips of duets; marching and leaping for Cooper, who is as engaging as possible as the soldier with his beloved violin, which represents his soul. Much of the rest is mugging, and the 75 minutes pass slowly. In the sections when Stravinsky’s music takes time off, you certainly miss it.
Upstairs on the main stage at Covent Garden, Irek Mukha- medov returned as the tormented, demented Crown Prince Rudolf in Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling — the role that he first danced in 1992, when MacMillan revived the ballet for him. Earlier this season, we saw gripping performances as Rudolf from Cope, Kobborg and Acosta. Mukhamedov, now in his mid-40s, is their senior. His dra- matic skills, the intelligence and chilling intensity of his inter-
Advertisement
pretation, are undimmed; the emotional conflicts in his scene with the empress, the mother he can’t reach (the excellent Genesia Rosato), especially powerful.
In the physical demands of the big dance moments in the first two acts, he seemed careful, as if pacing himself. We missed the surge and fire. But he pulled out all the stops in the final scenes, heading for destruction with Mara Galeazzi, as his compelling soul mate, Mary Vetsera. Together, they went out in a blaze.
English National Ballet’s summer season at the Albert Hall, with arena productions of the classics, has been a regular attraction since 1997, when Derek Deane, the company’s former director, initiated this new concept with the biggest-ever staging of Swan Lake. Romeo and Juliet and Sleeping Beauty followed, but Swan Lake proved the most successful, and it has just — deservedly — been packing them in again.
Deane’s great achievement was to deploy massed forces — the company enlarged to a strength of 120 — to fill the arena, and cleverly adapt the choreography to face all round, without losing the poetic heart of the work. Amid the swirling, watery light on a lake of dry ice, his formations for a vast flock of 60 swans are especially affective and lovely. The price to pay here is that the noise of so many pointe shoes, when they are running, suggests the Household Cavalry cantering by, but we have grown to live with that.
Over the seasons, besides ENB’s own regular principals, these productions have featured distinguished guest stars. This year’s first-night cast brought us a 19-year-old newcomer to London, in her debut as Odette/Odile — Polina Semionova, trained at the Bolshoi Academy and now a leading artist of the Berlin Staatsoper. Tall, beautiful in proportions and looks, utterly feminine but steely strong, she was touchingly soulful as Odette, dazzlingly seductive as Odile — a performance of total confidence and virtuosity. She was blessed with an ideal Prince Sieg fried in Roberto Bolle, originator of the role when this production was new: a heart-throb hero, noble, sensitive, immaculate and stage- devouringly powerful in technique. A partnership of top quality.