A mercurial genius’ legacy
Finds ballets troubling, stirring and cheering in the Kenneth MacMillan season at Covent Garden
Covent Garden’s Kenneth MacMillan season continued apace last week with two overlapping bills that took us from the lightest end of his creative spectrum to the very darkest. Featured on both programmes (and performed by the Royal Ballet), The Judas Tree is the last ballet that MacMillan created. It is also possibly the most oblique, probably the most violent, and almost certainly the most unsettling. Owing much to the Gnostic Gospels, but also drawing on the gritty Last Exit to Brooklyn, it’s about violence, betrayal, jealously, and self-loathing. And anyone expecting a linear plot must look elsewhere.
It plays out on a construction site in the shadow of Canary Wharf, with a lone, madonna-and-whore Woman; her Judas-like boyfriend, the Foreman; his two Friends (one a Jesus figure; the other, Peter-ish); and 11 Workmen. Swathed in a white veil, she’s provocative and apparently faithless, suffering atrociously at the hands of her envious beau, and then in an appalling gang rape.
Now, as in 1992, The Judas Tree makes for uncomfortable viewing, but it does see Jock McFadyen’s set, Brian Elias’s score and MacMillan’s startling choreography fuse into a gripping whole. You watch with a mixture of nervous exhilaration at the brilliance with which MacMillan deploys his dancers, and revulsion at the cruelty that he dishes out to the only woman on stage.
This week, Lauren Cuthbertson (Tuesday) and Melissa Hamilton (Thursday) both made spirited debuts in the latter role – Hamilton, in fact, one of a quartet of debutants on the second evening. Cuthbertson had the edge, making a great deal of vital steps that passed almost unnoticed in Hamilton’s rendering, but both were quite fearless.
On Tuesday, Edward Watson (Jesus) and Apollonian dynamo Reece Clark (debuting as Peter) were both good, as were Thursday’s equivalents (Matthew Ball and Calvin Richardson). But, while Thiago Soares and Bennet Gartside both brought a potent brutishness to the Foreman, neither of them (Gartside especially) came close to rivalling Irek Mukhamedov, the ex-Bolshoi powerhouse for whom the role was created. (Rating: 4 stars for Tuesday; 3 for Thursday)
Infinitely more humanistic is MacMillan’s Song of the Earth (1965). Set to Mahler’s famous song-cycle, this is regarded as one of MacMillan’s masterpieces, a musing on the inevitability of death that also gently cautions against fearing it. Although (whisper it softly) quite a haul at 63 minutes straight through, Mahler undoubtedly inspired MacMillan to operate here at an almost constant white-heat of physical inventiveness. The choreography is as constantly surprising as it is beautiful – it is also very difficult.
On Tuesday evening, English National Ballet’s performance was entirely respectable and yet missing something. For all their individual strengths, the three leads never seemed fully to get under each other’s skin, and the drama never quite soared. (3 stars)
Mortality also looms large over a Judas Tree shorter, bleaker masterwork, Gloria. For this 1980 piece, MacMillan looked to Vera Brittain’s autobiography, Testament of Youth, and delivered a ballet – set to Poulenc’s jarringly ravishing Gloria in G major – that was similarly drenched in despair at the lives squandered in war.
Northern Ballet’s performance of it on Thursday was terrific – far from being fazed by their Covent Garden debut, they appeared fired by it. Framed with complete professionalism by the corps, all the lead dancers made supremely confident work of MacMillan’s intricate lifts and throws, allowing the by turns tragic, elegiac and nostalgic flavour of each vignette to register stirringly. This was very smart programming on the part of NB director David Nixon, and his company did him proud. (4 stars)
As earlier in this mini-season, Thursday night wrapped with all five of Britain’s leading ballet companies joining forces for Elite Syncopations, and having fun with this high-spirited ragtime social-dance. (4 stars)
You left both evenings delighted at this rare and ongoing piece of intercompany glasnost and, above all, marvelling at the protean, utterly undated genius of Kenneth MacMillan.