The career of Natalie Portman has always had more light than shade. Even her lapdancing sylph in Closer erred towards the porcelain. Casting her in Black Swan was a calculated risk by Darren Aronofsky.
Manon, Manon, the little minx. Here she comes again - for the 223rd time, last night - and like the legendary ladies of her trade, scrubs up fresh and newly captivating, as if she’d only just skipped off the carriage from the convent.
Pina Bausch decided: “Words can’t do more than just evoke things - that’s where dance comes in.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Only if they’re bad words and good dance - bad writhing instead of, say, Shakespeare’s words isn’t much of a swap. But with Bausch, people tended to hang on every word, probably because so much of her dance was indeed pretty damn good, and it’s so difficult to put into words just why that was.
It's just been crowned the BBC Music Magazine Awards' CD of the Year. But is Valery Gergiev's second complete recording of the 20th century's greatest ballet score, captured live at the Barbican for the LSO's own label, right at the top? In my Building a Library survey for BBC Radio 3, condensed in print for the BBCMM, I suggested it might be the best in state-of-the-art sound - but not the finest overall version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. That palm went to Rozhdestvensky's much more impeccably paced old Melodiya version, in mono and dating from 1959.
As the young waitress said in the restaurant where we ate after last night’s world premiere of Ashley Page’s Alice in Glasgow, she hadn’t ever been to ballet, but she was tempted to go for this - “It’s Alice after all, isn’t it? Wonderland. I’d love to see Wonderland.” The kind of new audience that any company should kill for.
And my friend said, sadly, yes, that’s what we’d also supposed it would be. "So shall I go?" she said. We said, um, you’re right. Ballet is the one place where you really can hope to see Wonderland, the unsayable, the merely imaginable. But there is always the danger that you’ll be put off ballet if you see something that messed it up. Three hearts sank together.
This production starts from a much firmer premise than Christopher Wheeldon’s failure de luxe at the Royal Ballet last month: the idea that Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson, was as much a photographer as an author, and that his fantastical writing came from his dissociative habit of looking at life through a lens. Alice therefore - we surmise - exists both in front of the lens (the real Alice) and behind Dodgson’s (the vision he wishes to shape of her).
To further this fruitful idea, the stage is dominated at the start by a gigantic bellows camera, which after Alice dives through the lens, splits open to show a black box behind which looms a large antique mahogany slide-camera frame. This is a very clever setting for a dual layering of activity, the associative memory provided by projections in the frame, and the “real” episodes on the stage.
And it’s really quite like Monty Python’s old tricks; superb costuming by Antony McDonald - the suit of Hearts are triumphs of sharp, fantastical tailoring (see the gallery below) - their very real presence complemented by the alluringly surreal video work of Annemarie Woods, acting like the Terry Gilliam in the Python team, sneaking in her strange visions behind the action in the photo frame.
All goes very well in the design department - it’s in the choreographic, dramaturgical and musical areas that things rapidly become unstuck. Page, like Wheeldon in London, has relied too much upon his designer, McDonald, to package the favourite episodes, and on the composer to provide yards of musical lining, as he has no linear drama to provide for his part. But the composer, Robert Moran in this instance, can work as hard and as ingeniously as he might to provide yards of music for Lobster Quadrilles, Humpty Dumpty (half baby, half egg, all silly), Tweedledum and Tweedledee (schoolgirls) and whathaveyou, but he is seriously up Indecision Creek if the co-directors show no belief in what the various dance episodes are adding up to. And for long periods one feels Moran killing time with cool, arrhythmic percussiveness - lots of marimbas, wood blocks, drums - in between strong waltzes and Pulcinella-like courtliness, just waiting for an instruction about an emotional destination.
The reason the public loves Alice is because she’s an enigmatic mirror for their imaginings. By contrast, Charles Dodgson is stuck with a modern reputation as a faintly weird man who liked to photograph a pre-pubescent child naked. Frankly, had Page decided to do Alice as a variant of Humbert Humbert and Lolita he’d have both served his designers better and given himself a real theatrical focus of emotional immediacy.
As it is, this is an endurance test of a ballet, two hours plus the interval, trying for children and adults alike, in which charm goes begging yet risks are refused. Alice, danced by the exquisitely elegant and intelligent Sophie Martin, isn’t the true heart of the ballet because her series of pas de deux with Dodgson travel nowhere, despite her growing older. The third duet is the outstanding one, sincere and honest, two people in frank sexual imbalance, he yearning for her, she tempted but refusing - the best of Page’s work in the night. But Dodgson feels like the missing centre of this character ballet - despite his omnipresence, Page consigns the inexpressive Eric Cavallari to a bland proto-Classical idiom that yields no insight into who Dodgson might be.
Yet what Annemarie Woods’s strange and succulent visions in the back frame (a drawing of one, pictured left) mesmerisingly suggest is the rich confusion, the unorthodox interior landscape, of a young, awkward Victorian man obsessed with the sexual wonderland of a girl and her changes from an easily understood child into a completely baffling young woman. Often it’s the ocean that we see in her Dalí-esque visions, peppered with little bobbing Alice heads at different ages, or proudly bearing an approaching sailboat with her standing on it like Botticelli’s Venus, but invested with a lobster crown and a jam tart shield, a parodic Britannia, queen of the ungovernable currents inside Dodgson’s head. Woods does seem to have the measure of the book in a way Page doesn’t.
Here and there one catches a glimpse of the much more interesting ballet Page might have done had he been braver, in the echoes he draws with the dark male characters of MacMillan’s ballets that he himself once played, from Tybalt to the King of the South in Prince of the Pagodas. The tangoing Caterpillar, with his huge mushroom and dangerous hookah, is quite a sleazy menace to a young girl. The ménage à trois of the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse has associations with two men oppressing a little girl in her pyjamas for sinister reasons. The Jabberwock, a fearsome-looking axeman with a black executioner’s block covering his head, is unmasked as a fevered, almost vampiric young man.
The visions they present are not as vanilla as the dance they do. This production strongly suggests something undeveloped, film left in the camera, visions sanitised in the processing. All add up to a long, antiseptic and resistible experience. Not Wonderland. Off with their heads.
OVERLEAF: ALICE'S ADVENTURES ON STAGE AND SCREEN
Ninety-nine years ago, there were sights and stars seen upon the ballet stage as had never been dreamed of. A young genius of 32 was the driving engine of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes - the choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who created fantasies of radiant Blue Gods, of murderous and erotic goddesses, and tapestries that came to life and sucked dreamers into them. His stars were to become immortals: Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Ida Rubinstein… the most beautiful divinities of the stage, their names living on.
Forty years ago, my childhood self wasn't in the least bored by Frederick Ashton's balletic animal magic: I saw it twice in cinemas large and small and asked for the soundtrack LP of John Lanchbery's masterly Victorian-potpourri ballet score for my birthday. If I get a bit restless now, it might be because I want more, which is less, in terms of pace; the best stories here are all in the first half, the picnic finale is interminable and no doubt there's something odd about the mice, the frog, the pigs and the fox ending up together and all the same size. Otherwise it's good to see it again and remember the names behind the masks.
The Arts Council’s rearrangement of the dance world by its handling of its 15 per cent subsidy cut shows no change in its persistence in choosing to prefer bureaucratic structures to talent. The 15 per cent cut has been handed straight over to all the ballet companies, with no evidence of strategic thinking about the implications for numbers of dancers, productions or programming. But it’s in the area of contemporary dance that my first impression is of an urge at HQ to pass the buck of decisions to the regions to handle.
Birmingham is the fount of beauty and magic when it comes to ballet design. Covent Garden - forget it, too much money, too little taste. What illustrates that truism is the comparison that can be made between the Royal Ballet’s cartoony Cinderella production returning to WC2 next week and the magical visual experience that is John Macfarlane’s vision for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s new Cinderella, having its London premiere at the Coliseum this week.
Well, if you’re going to headline yourself in the title of your show "the talent", you’d better have some: audiences aren’t forgiving. William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, ex-Royal Ballet dancers headlining their own company for the last decade, have a history of these pre-emptive strikes – an earlier show was called Critics’ Choice – and they also have a history of living up to them. Fortunately for all, The Talent does too.