A sinfully undramatic tour of the afterlife
Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, London WC2
As ever, with any literary adaptation of any kind, there are two approaches to watching Wayne Mcgregor’s corporately titled The Dante Project, which the Royal Ballet finally premiered on Thursday.
One, often the more sensible, is to forget its source material (in this case, Dante Alighieri’s early 14th-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy) and enjoy it entirely on its own terms. In which case, you might have a decent evening – and one that does, in fairness, pass with surprising speed.
The all-new score by Thomas Adès is fantastic. An odyssey-in-music from the spine-chilling depths of hell to the transporting, hope-filled expanse of the cosmos (God’s?), and full of exciting rhythms, colours and textures, this is a creation of the sort of insight and sheer bravura you’d expect from Adès.
There are various passages in Hell – sorry: “Inferno: Pilgrim” – where that and Mcgregor’s lively ensemble passages combine to wash immersively over you. And in the latter stages of Paradise – apologies again: “Paradiso: Poema Sacro” – score, steps, Lucy Carter’s gilt-edged lighting and video-artist Tacita Dean’s light show of mercurial concentric circles fuse beautifully. (It’s a pity the latter are prissily contained in a rectangular screen, but then again, you shouldn’t have too much fun in Heaven, right?)
The other approach is to consider it as a theatrically involving “translation” of a wonder of world literature – and it is on this level that The Dante Project falls short. Take Hell, for example. I don’t doubt for a second that Mcgregor has studied the original with great care. But has this forensic research translated into a propulsive, emotion-grabbing descent into the depths?
Here, there is no sense of forward or downward motion or momentum. However hard you concentrate, I defy you to identify the various sins – surely a gift to a choreographer – from the steps alone, and the same goes for many of the characters. (One of my companions, an experienced English teacher, well-versed in the original: “So that was Beatrice that Dante was just dancing with, right?” Me: “Actually, I think it was Satan.”)
Mcgregor has also failed to solve the problem of what to do with Virgil (Dante’s physical and moral guide, here played by a doing-his-level-best Gary Avis) as he escorts Dante (Ed Watson, ditto) around; or, for that matter, with Dante himself. The result, however well danced by all, feels uncomfortably like Act II of The Nutcracker, as Drosselmeyer whisks Clara and chum around the Kingdom of the Sweets – just with less magic and more togas. (About Purgatory – sorry again: “Purgatorio: Love” – the less said the better.)
Yes, the show has its moments; and my, that score. But I still wouldn’t have swapped all 165 minutes of it for just 10 of the previous week’s and Juliet.