A Casanova who’s more Terry-Thomas than Brando

Ballet

Casanova

Northern Ballet, Sadler’s Wells, London EC1

★★★ ★★

Mark Monahan

Ballet does sex well, and so it should: the art form consists essentially of beautiful, scantily clad people moving to (you hope) beautiful music, and the passionate clinch known as the pas de deux is one of its cornerstones. It also tends to thrive on stories that lend themselves to moody atmospheres and lavish theatrical spectacle. All of which go to make the notorious 18th-century rake Giacomo Casanova a logical choice for the subject of a full-evening work.

There’s a lot that’s good about the 2017 Northern Ballet piece that bears his name, revived this season for the first time. Created by former NB dancer Kenneth Tindall, to a scenario based by Tindall and Ian Kelly on the latter’s Casanova biography, it ambitiously sets out to trace its questionable hero’s many falls, rises and affairs in Venice and then Paris – full of embellishments on fact, but very much rooted in it. And, thanks to the considerable efforts of designer Christopher Oram and lighting designer Alastair West, it’s as handsome as they come.

The costumes tread a deft line between decadence and tastefulness, and the sets are tremendous, especially for a touring production. It’s debatable how Venetian the three large clusters of gilded columns in Act I are, but with Spielbergian shafts of light often beaming down through industrial quantities of incense-like smoke, they look terrific and prove surprisingly mercurial, generating the right sense of by turns liturgical and domestic opulence. Act II’s huge, faded-mirror louvres prove similarly impressive and protean. Oram and West repeatedly deliver the evening’s biggest surprises.

If this sounds like an indictment of Tindall’s steps, it is, in fairness, a qualified one. Casanova’s various amorous encounters all raise the stakes considerably, and include moments of genuine choreographic originality (with tables repeatedly put to eye-poppingly licentious use). Those moments are, however, fleeting, and – especially given certain decent but slightly rotefeeling ensemble sections – there’s a sense of MacMillan-lite about this show that I struggled to shake. This isn’t helped by the fact that several passages (the failed-priest opening, the orgy, the climactic ghosts from the past) evoke MacMillan’s giddily inventive masterpiece Manon, a full-evening work that, 45 years later, still burns at a far higher temperature, and tells a similarly complex story with greater clarity.

Still, the Northern Ballet dancers respond to the story (and to Kerry Muzzey’s easy-on-the-ear original score) with energy and discipline – especially Joseph Taylor as the titular libertine, even if he does feel more Terry-Thomas-style cad than Brando-ish sex-bomb. Abigail Prudames puts her long, lyrical frame to striking use as the offbeat nun, MM, who – stretching her vows of chastity surely beyond breaking point – seduces Casanova for the pleasure of her voyeuristic lover; while Saeka Shirai gives the piece a moral compass with her graceful Henriette, who attempts the uphill task of making an honest man of its hero. Javier Torres has fun as Bragadin, the nobleman who takes a fancy to him, and the corps are consistently on the ball.

Although the piece’s knotty story requires a close consultation (or three) of the synopsis beforehand, its various seams of gender-fluidity and both male and female predation give it more substance than a standard terpsichorean bodiceripper. That said – and for all the piece’s ultimate attempt to reclaim the name “Casanova” as synonymous with “man of letters” as opposed to “priapic scoundrel” – most people will, I suspect, go to it in search of a gorgeous-looking, unthreateningly racy night out. And this, flaws and all, is what it delivers.

At Sadler’s until May 14, then at the Lowry in Salford from May 18–21. Tickets: northernballet.com