The bitchy world of ballet

Memoirs of old men, baldly, tend to be tricky. Sir Peter Wright, one of the founding pillars of the British ballet establishment, is now 90, and a charmingly chatty man; but I’ve personally never found him reluctant to get to the point when asked. As inaugural director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, director of Sadler’s Wells Ballet and associate director of the Royal Ballet, he has spent more than half a century inside the amazing British ballet story. I had high expectations of these copious memoirs.

So it’s a great pity that his amanuensis, Paul Arrowsmith, has essentially switched on the tape recorder and let memories pour, failing to check or marshal the mass of detail into narrative significance and a coherent reading experience. There are also many egregious mistakes with names and dates (even Wright’s own jobs are not properly indexed). Wright has been wronged.

While the chapters are notionally centred around the exciting people — de Valois, MacMillan, Ashton, Cranko — and industrial aspects — television dance, the Birmingham relocation of Sadler’s Wells Ballet, classical requirements — the material dots about maddeningly, overlapping, with chronology going to pot.