Royal Ballet: Double Bill
Royal Opera House
Theatre magic has a lot to do with the unpredictability of the performed event. Regardless of the alluring promise of an all-star cast or the doubts raised by daring artistic choices, there is no certain way to forecast what any live performance will be like. Indeed, it is this surprise/disappointment factor that has kept me going for all the years I have spent both on stage and in front of it.
Last week I expressed some serious doubts about a Royal Ballet triple bill. The artistic flatness of the performances I saw impinged seriously on my desire to see more from the same company. But last Saturday I left the Royal Opera feeling in that very good mood so rarely experienced by critics.
Not unlike the previous triple bill, the new programme contrasts a 20th-century masterwork of American ballet history with a milestone of the British 20th-century repertoire. This time, instead of Serenade vs Homage to the Queen it is Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering (1969) vs Frederick Ashton’s The Dream (1964). Robbins’s 63-minute-long plotless ballet to piano music by Chopin, played with romantic gusto and abandon by Philip Gammon, used to be one of the Royal Ballet’s greatest hits in the golden days everyone raves about and claims to remember. I, too, recall those electrifying performances, but I am not willing to draw sterile comparisons; an art as ephemeral as ballet can be effectively evaluated only for what it is now and not in line with the illusory remains of inevitably fading memories. Unlike the Serenade performances I saw two weeks ago, Dances at a Gathering seems to have been restaged with unique care, stylistic finesse and, above all, great attention to the interpretative shadings.
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