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.