Handsome battles of the sexes
La Sylphide/le Jeune Homme et la Mort
The battle of the sexes makes for entertaining (and not entirely un-topical) viewing in English National Ballet’s handsomely designed new double bill. First comes a piece in which a femme fatale goads her hapless amant into suicide. Next up is the tale of a young Scottish fellow, James, who falls for an other-worldly sylph on the eve of his wedding to a nice local lassie: he unwittingly kills the sylph, loses his bride-to-be (to his best mate, no less), and winds up in solitary misery. Perfect first-date fodder? Perhaps not.
At any rate, La Sylphide is the more substantial of the two pieces, as well as occupying a unique place in the history of ballet: this 1836 Danish reworking of a piece first staged in Paris in 1832 is the oldest ballet that has survived more or less intact. It’s Romantic to its core: in the Scottish setting, the far from nuanced roles for women (up to and including a wicked old witch), and the inevitably fatal interplay between the real and spirit worlds. Yet it also shows its creator – the great August Bournonville – at his nimble best and, thanks to the brio with which ENB tackle it, it also feels remarkably fresh.
On Tuesday evening, in a modestly cast performance, soloist Aitor Arrieta made a convincing James. Fudging only the occasional jump, he brought breeziness, buoyancy and just the right degree of apprehension to the role of the man torn between modest earthly delights and an ungraspable ideal, making James’s dilemma ring out clearly while keeping the character just about sympathetic. Corps member Henry Dowden, a name to watch by the looks of it, was similarly strong as James’s opportunistic pal Gurn – cue a vigorous Act I dance-off between the two – while first artist Stina Quagebeur came very close to stealing the show as a lip-smackingly wicked (and often hilarious) Madge.
As the titular Sylph – an immensely challenging part, as the whole dramatic point of the character is absolute perfection – first soloist Alison Mcwhinney danced daintily, and played her death scene with beautiful and very stirring understatement, However, my cavil with her performance extends to the girls’ corps as a whole.
They were, in typical ENB fashion, disciplined, boisterous and brilliant in Act I’s very terrestrial ensembles, and a similarly tight unit in the Act II “white” scene. But in the latter, like Mcwhinney, they never quite managed to convince you of their ethereality – the final, tiny but crucial dash of lightness was perhaps missing. Meanwhile, as James’s jilted (but remarkably resilient) bride, Effy, the superbly musical first artist Francesca Velicu – another young dancer to keep an eye on – was so delectable that James’s straying looked not just particularly foolish, but close to implausible.
If La Sylphide, casting-wise, was in the main a laudable showcase for the lower ranks, ENB wheeled out two 16-inch guns for Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. Roland Petit’s wildly OTT 1946 romantic melodrama – a stylised bellow of postwar Parisian angst – here pitched company director and star principal Tamara Rojo against returning superstar guest Ivan Vasiliev. And, although the crackle between the two didn’t come close to burning retinas the way Rojo and Nicolas Le Riche’s did in 2013, the piece still worked its lurid magic.
Needling her gloved hands down his back like black widows, giddily luxuriating in tipping him on to the floor with a dagger-like foot, Rojo was a predator and then some. As for Vasiliev, although perhaps a fraction less wiry than in the past, his stillexplosive aerial pizzazz, in-yer-face masculinity and boggle-eyed misery (the latter arguably a tad overdone, though frankly who cares?) gripped the attention from the start and didn’t let go. This, in fact, is a piece that might have been tailor-made for the 29-year-old Russian, whose astonishing curtain call revealed just how much of his uniquely high-octane fuel he still had left in the tank.