Uninventive and far too polite: BRB’s Black Sabbath – The Ballet reviewed

Not being an aficionado of the heavy-metal genre, I snootily suspected that I would rather be standing in the rain flogging the Big Issue than suffer the racket that goes by the name of Black Sabbath. The noise, my dear, and the people! How could they? So I approached Birmingham Royal Ballet’s attempt to dance to its shenanigans armed with earplugs and gritted teeth.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected: in fact, it erred towards the polite and tasteful, and I wondered if a crowd largely consisting of hairy and leathery old rockers – some of them possibly anticipating satanic rituals or heads being bitten off chickens – got much out of it. The numbers, if that’s what you call them, had been quite sensitively filtered and orchestrated, at a decibel level even I found  inoffensive. Recorded voices of the two most famous members of the band, Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne, were intermittently heard reminiscing: both sounded endearing, and I was amused and fascinated to hear Iommi admit that in his youth he had been a ‘medium’ fan of Holst’s The Planets – it makes sense.

The real disappointment was the dismally uninventive dance. The show is nominally divided into three half-hour sections – the first thematically focused on the creation of the ballet, the second on the story of the band, the third on its legacy. Not that you could tell: they looked indistinguishable. Each had been assigned to a different young choreographer (Raul Reinoso, Cassi Abranches, Pontus Lidberg), none of whom had any idea what to do with the material. The net effect, amid much strobe and dry ice and black on black, was a sort of aimless and mundane hyper-energetic workout, with patches of breakdancing and disco jiving interspersed with simple classroom manoeuvres, all overseen by the guitarist Marc Hayward, embodying the spirit of the band.