Ballet gets Trainspotting treatment
Highland Fling
Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Imagine a head-on collision between
Brigadoon and Trainspotting, and you would have something approximating Matthew Bourne’s 1994 work Highland Fling.
It is five years since Bourne last directed this daring version of La
Sylphide, the 1836 romantic ballet by Danish choreographer August Bournonville, for Scottish Ballet, but its imagery is so vivid and memorable that it feels like only yesterday.
Bourne updates the pastoralism of Bournonville’s love story about two young Scottish peasants, James and Effie, to 21st-century Glasgow. Here, the hedonism that precedes the planned wedding of James (now an unemployed welder) and Effie has a decidedly urban flavour, with a drug-addled James slumped in a urinal in the Highland Fling social club. There he is beguiled by a punkish and ragged sylph (a winged siren) who, he believes, loves him more than Effie ever could. As James sinks ever deeper into his hallucination, the party descends into audacious comic excesses of the bacchanalian, chemical and sexual varieties.
Events move on to a council flat which is (thanks to Lez Brotherston’s wonderfully outrageous designs) a garish vision in tartan and football paraphernalia. There we are treated to delightful choreography of drinkinduced bonhomie, casual affection, jealous conflict and a gin-swilling granny in a wheelchair. In the midst of this chaos, James continues to see the vision of the sylph. This leads him in Act 2 to a woodland glade outside the city, where a legion of fairies surrounds his beloved siren.
Now, as in 2013, the shift in visual tone and choreographic energy between the two acts feels like a shift down in balletic gears. But there is also pleasure in the contrast between Bourne and Brotherston’s urban hyperrealism and mud-spattered punk fairies and the carefully wrought Romanticism of Herman Severin Løvenskiold’s original score.
Christopher Harrison (James) and Sophie Martin (the sylph) lead the universally excellent company, as they did five years ago, with a brilliant combination of slapstick and elegance.
Indeed, it is testament to both Bourne and the dancers that such an over-the-top ballet should achieve such a horrifying and moving conclusion.