The Spectator - 29.02.2020

the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.uk 45

Grocery Bag,

2016, oil on canvas, 18 x 16 inches

JAMES LLOYD

4 – 27 March 2020

Monday - Friday 10.00-5.30

Saturday by appointment

Browse_spec_29.02.20_4.indd 1 24/02/2020 12:57

Bausch who’s the real maestro here, flipping

gloom on its head. Savage encounters turn

frisky; jokey montages end in bodies beaten

against walls. Nothing is straightforward — a

riddle she would return to in works such as

Café Müller (1978) and Victor (1986), resist-

ing black-and-white moral scrutiny.

Christopher Tandy brings a brutal prag-

matism to the title role — he doesn’t want

to hurt you, but he will — while Silvia Farias

Heredia is his terminally hopeful wife, bolt-

ing (and later limping) through dead leaves

to dive into his arms once again. As the men

of the ensemble creep and gurn, the women

defer, swerving between fawning and fright-

ened. They’re gifted a fleeting moment of

dominance when they join forces and whip

Bluebeard with their hair.

At two hours uninterrupted, it’s a long,

wearying watch, full of duplicated outbursts,

each reworked with ever-sharper fury. The

repetition is the point, I guess — a nod to the

grapples lovers insist on going to bat for —

but it doesn’t make these bruising encoun-

ters any easier to witness. Where the mood

is ugly, though, the stagecraft is bright. Blue-

beard tees up the high-throttle theatricality

and expressiveness we’ve come to associate

with the author of modern Tanztheater, the

lush sets and waggish peacocking. There’s

historical value here, no question.

The choreographer Cathy Marston totes

her own decorated catalogue, and her new

ballet, The Cellist, is a choice addition. In

step with her fondness for distinguished

female subjects, it spotlights Jacqueline du

Pré, a mid-century cello prodigy who lost

her gift to multiple sclerosis. It’s Marston’s

first main-stage production for the Royal

Ballet and distills a complex chronicle into

a thoughtful hour of dance.

Lauren Cuthbertson brings a wistful

radiance to the central role, clasping her

instrument with longing. By instrument

I mean fellow principal Marcelino Sambé,

who’s tasked with animating her cello as

a living, feeling companion. It’s a delicate

act, but Sambé pulls it off, melting into Cuth-

bertson’s rocking pliés while gusts of Elgar

and other staples from Du Pré’s rep surge

in the background. There’s fluency in their

sways, serenity to the way they curl into each

other’s blank spaces. Marston’s choreogra-

phy is resourceful, gesturing at orchestral

performance without tipping into literalism.

The ballet zips through 30 years of biog-

raphy, including Du Pré’s teenage debut

and her marriage to the conductor Daniel

Barenboim (Matthew Ball, looking very

debonair). The storyboarding is muddy —

there are some forgettable characters and

confusing timelines, some fussing with car-

digans and cello cases — though it prudently

leaves the MS struggle for the final chapter.

Kudos to Marston for defining her subject

by her talent, not the disease that stole it.

No such nuance in the other half of this

double bill, a revival of Jerome Robbins’s

Dances at a Gathering. That it’s a vehicle for

technique, not narrative, should be self-evi-

dent — it has no plot or characters — but

apparently early audiences needed it spelled

out, because Robbins yell-wrote some explic-

it instructions to the editor of Ballet Review

in 1972: ‘please print in large, emphatic and

capital letters [that] THERE ARE NO

STORIES TO ANY OF THE DANCES

IN DANCES AT A GATHERING...THE

DANCERS ARE THEMSELVES DANC-

ING WITH EACH OTHER TO THAT

MUSIC IN THAT SPACE.’

‘That music’ is a string of Chopin piano

pieces, including a mazurka that races like

a Looney Tunes chase scene. It’s a fickle

soundtrack — witty one minute, elegiac the

next — that sends the dance to all sorts of

places: sliding splits and flicking feet, cen-

tre-stage gallops and lifts that zoom into

the wings. Marianela Nunez is the best of

the bunch at carving out quiet moments

amid the noise.

Savage encounters turn frisky;

jokey montages end in bodies

beaten against walls

Arts_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 45 26/02/2020 10:44