La Fille mal gardée
Choreographer: Frederick Ashton Music: Ferdinand Hérold Conductor: Barry Wordsworth Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) Running time: 2hrs 25mins (including interval)
“Autumn may be coming, but there’s endless sunshine in La Fille mal gardée,” said Zoë Anderson in The Independent. Warmth comes “glowing off the stage” in the Royal Ballet’s revival of Frederick Ashton’s ballet, beloved for its “enchanting blend of sweetness and brilliant dancing”. In a story of young love thwarted, then fulfilled, village girl Lise loves handsome young farmer Colas, but her mother wants her to marry the rich neighbour’s son. It’s a triumph of choreography, and in Laura Morera and Vadim Muntagirov, the work is blessed with two stunning dancers, their work “packed with technique and tenderness”.
Morera is “musical as it is given to few ballerinas to be”, said Clement Crisp in the FT. She “lives in, feeds on and reveals to us” the score; her Lise “wins our hearts as she wins Colas’s”. Ashton’s “flawless masterpiece” is beautifully realised by her flawless dancing. And as the noble Colas, Muntagirov is no less thrilling: “so clear, so exhilarating, so classically pure is his dancing”, and “so emotionally touching is his characterisation”, the role “seems newborn”. The supporting cast is also very fine, including Thomas Whitehead as Widow Simone and Paul Kay as the innocent suitor Alain.
Unusually for a critic, I caught a schools’ matinee, said Mark Monahan in The Daily Telegraph. And the soloists at that performance were also magnificent, and elicited a joyfully vocal response from their young audience (“Wooooo!” “Yeeaahh!” “Waaaaay!”). Francesca Hayward, the Royal Ballet’s “dazzling, newly appointed principal”, and Portuguese soloist Marcelino Sambé are superb dancers who appear to enjoy a “take-it-or-leave-it relationship with the laws of gravity”. They are also “uninhibitedly generous and scrumptiously warm” stage artists and “fine comedians”. Together, they are “dynamite” – and the children in the audience loved it: the pair’s final clinch was greeted with a roar worthy of a “Justin Bieber gig”.
Satirising political figures is a risky business, said Elise Czajkowski in The Guardian. Take Alec Baldwin’s take-off of Donald Trump on last week’s Saturday Night Live, the satirical TV show. Baldwin got everything right – the hair, the belligerently jutting lower lip. Yet it all seemed a bit “lifeless”. And maybe that’s because some people are beyond parody. One felt that the writers of the skit were unable to create a caricature “more over-thetop” than Trump himself.
It’s not just that satire may lack bite, said Tim Walker in The Independent: it may even have the opposite effect of inadvertently humanising him or her. Back in 2008, Tina Fey’s hilarious Saturday Night Live send-up of governor Sarah Palin is thought to have done just that for Palin. The same goes for Will Ferrell’s portrayal of a clueless-seeming George W. Bush back in 2003.
And in the case of Donald Trump, there’s yet another reason that satire can backfire, said Walker. Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, was present in 2011 when President Obama mercilessly mocked Trump in front of the guests at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In Gopnik’s view, it was then and there that Trump “decided... that he would somehow get his own back”. In short, it was a comedy “roasting” that first set Donald Trump on the road to the White House.