Beg, borrow or steal to watch these two gifted dancers
La Fille mal gardée Royal Ballet, Covent Garden
Back in January, reviewing Francesca Hayward in Frederick Ashton’s Rhapsody, I described her performance as one “that I doubt will be bettered all year”. I might, and indeed should, have added: “– but you wouldn’t bet against her matching it.” With every fresh debut, Hayward – 24 years old, and only just promoted to principal – reinforces her status as the Royal Ballet’s most luminous new star. Born in Nairobi to a Kenyan mother and British father, but brought up in Sussex by her paternal grandparents, she has an unflashy but complete technical command that gives her speed, strength, lightness, lyricism, exceptional ballon (or bounce) and particularly ravishing épaulement, that distinctively feminine carriage of the head and shoulders so crucial to Ashton’s work.
Add a truly exceptional talent for acting, a perfectly proportioned 5ft 2in frame as well as looks worthy of a Hollywood A-lister, and the result is a performer already as versatile and bewitching as any I have ever seen.
And so it proved this week, when she made a fresh debut in an even greater Ashton creation, his sublime, sun-dappled romantic comedy of love among the hay bales, La Fille mal gardée (1960). One bewilderingly rude usher aside, this matinée proved an experience of utter enchantment, an ensemble effort in which everyone, from leads to corps to orchestra, pulled out every stop.
At the show’s heart were Hayward (as Lise, the wayward daughter of the title) and swarthy Portuguese soloist Marcelino Sambé, as the young farmer of her affections. She turns out to be every bit as wonderful as her firefly-like Rhapsody gave you to expect – showing no trace at all of a recently sprained ankle – but more revelatory still is what a first-rate Colas he is, and what dynamite they are together.
Opposites can sometimes work well in ballet, but this double début was an irresistible sparking of two gloriously similar, marvellously musical dancers. Each is as technically superb as the other in both lower and upper body, fully up to the Swiss-watch physical detail in Ashton’s choreography, and enjoying a take-it-or-leave-it relationship with the laws of gravity: she is as fast and as fleet as a hummingbird, he rocket-fuelled but never slapdash in his leaps and turns.
But what also unites them is what completely credible, uninhibitedly generous and scrumptiously warm artists they are, and what fine comedians, too. There’s not a moment where either of them seems to be faking it: for all the stylisation of the art form, it never crosses your mind that these aren’t two real people, playfully and utterly in love.
Elsewhere, Philip Mosley is a fraction too much of an end-of-the-pier bruiser as Lise’s mother, Simone, but he fired off a very fine clog dance and got funnier as he went along: by the end, I was won over. As Alain – the hopeless but endearing halfwit to whom Simone wants to marry off Lise – Spanish corps member David Yudes is another revelation. He’s not yet in the league of Paul Kay (the Royal Ballet soloist who in recent years has made this role his own), but he breathes the same air, bringing both brisk musicality, nimble physicality and a crucial pathos to this difficult part.
But the day belonged to Hayward and Sambé, almost regal and remarkably stirring in the poise, glow, and rapture they brought to their final pas de deux. They instantly look like the partnership to watch.
They’re slated for just one more Fille this season, and it’s on Thursday evening. Beg, borrow and steal to catch them.
In rep until October 22. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk