How did a separation this tragic inspire such a lacklustre show?
The Unknown Soldier
In 1914, 16-year-old Florence Billington waved goodbye to her fellow, Ted Feltham, as he headed across the Channel to the Western Front. Two years her senior, he had taken her out just three or four times, but promised they’d get engaged when he returned. With a tragic inevitability, he never did.
This story is the backbone of The
Unknown Soldier, the new 30-minute piece by Alastair Marriott that opens the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill. Marriott is a choreographer who has made several works for the company, none particularly memorable. And, despite this new one doubtless having been conceived in good faith, it is, sadly, yet another entry on that undistinguished tally.
From the start, photographs of Billington and excerpts from an interview with her (at the age of 100) figure largely. The opening montage also includes footage of what looks like the actual burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, in 1920, that masterstroke of national mourning that allowed just one unidentified man to speak for so many.
But Marriott’s lead couple – as they meet, join others at a social dance, bid farewell, and so on – don’t manage anything remotely similar. And this is not the two lead performers’ fault. As Feltham, Matthew Ball dances exquisitely – passionate, virile, precise – while another smart, sexy young principal, Yasmine Naghdi, inhabits the role of Billington with sensuous commitment.
Compelling choreography, though, is in short supply: both for them, for the other two soloists, and for the clichéd military line-ups and clusters of fretting women. Time and time again, interview footage is relied upon to do the heavy emotional lifting. And on the one occasion when Marriott seems to be allowing you to sink into the couple’s story, vast photos of the real duo back in the day are suddenly beamed out across the back of the stage, ultimately crushing the embryonic physical drama.
Dario Marianelli’s over-egged score does not help, and nor do Es Devlin’s designs. The costumes, are passable, but the metallic-looking louvres that keep shifting across the rear of the stage are more American Gigolo than Battle of the Somme.
Also, for a work about one of the most dreadful conflicts in history, can the Royal Ballet really, in all conscience, yet again be raiding its apparently inexhaustible tea-chest of Speedos? It seems it can. Cue a final scene – depicting the dead soldiers’s souls liberated from their bodies, perhaps – that has the male dancers prancing around in said pants and nothing else: borderline obscene, you could argue, given the context.
In short, those interviews aside, there is no feeling of profound tragedy here, still less any sense of the scale of the calamity that was unfolding. Much as another big-name company, ENO, recently bungled its attempt at First World War commemoration (its staging of Britten’s War Requiem), so the Royal Ballet has sadly missed the target here too. Compare and contrast Akram Khan’s recent Great War tribute, Xenos: one small man, on stage, on his own, his electrifying movements and imagination speaking with crystal clarity for millions of traumatised soldiers.
Also on the Royal Ballet bill is Wayne Mcgregor’s more successful (though slightly dated-looking?) 2010 contemporary study of the human condition Infra (three stars) – sinuously danced by all – and Balanchine’s 1947 full-company neoclassical showpiece Symphony in C (also three stars). In the latter – so that’s what real choreography looks like! – the company overall looks a fraction nervous at the start, as if not quite speaking their own language, but they do settle into it. Amid a strong, starry cast, Vadim Muntagirov is the no-contest standout for the stateliness and complete ease with which he embraces and executes Balanchine’s grand style.