You can pay homage to a ballet classic or you can tear it up and reinvent it. Both approaches were on offer in London a fortnight ago: a revival of Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia, set to Léo Delibes’s 1876 score, and a Swan Lake from Michael Keegan-Dolan that ditches Tchaikovsky, tutus and toe shoes and relocates the story to a dysfunctional community in the Irish midlands.
There’s an eerie, gaslit vibe to the Royal Ballet’s Sylvia. Look along the row and you half expect the audience to be styled to match its Second Empire pastiche: epaulets, lorgnettes, rickets. When Ashton made Daphnis et Chloé, his other nymphs’n’shepherds ballet, in 1951, he professed himself bored by ‘people running around in tunics’ and opted for modern dress. But a year later, the fit had passed. Robin and Christopher Ironside gave Sylvia Poussin-style designs to match the baroque scenario of a virgin huntress, a rapacious abductor and a handy deus ex machina.
Despite an enchanting score, and a title role that lovingly showcased the stylistic range of Margot Fonteyn, 1950s audiences were not entirely convinced.
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