Birmingham Royal Ballet: Shadows of War review savage fragment of British dance history | Birmin
Birmingham Royal Ballet This article is more than 9 years oldReviewBirmingham Royal Ballet: Shadows of War review – savage fragment of British dance history
This article is more than 9 years oldSadler’s Wells, London
Even if the new choreography doesn’t convince, Birmingham Royal Ballet’s new version of Robert Helpmann’s lost Miracle in the Gorbels is still a gift to the archives
Robert Helpmann was one of the most vivid characters in British dance history: bug-eyed and lantern-jawed, he was the most unlikely of classical princes, but a thrilling, mercurial dance actor. Helpmann’s dramatic gift also informed his choreography, and it’s a gift to the archives that BRB have brought his lost 1944 ballet, Miracle in the Gorbels back to the stage.
Helpmann’s relocation of the story of Christ’s passion to a wartime Glasgow slum was radical for its time, and it also represented a very British collaboration with designs by Edward Burra and music by Arthur Bliss. BRB’s reconstruction, with new choreography by Gillian Lynne (who danced in the original cast) is impressively convincing in its period colours, and at its best in the stylised crowd scenes where the tenement-dwellers fall under the spell of a mysterious Christ figure, only to be turned savagely against him by a jealous Minister.
BRB’s cast perform with brio, yet too much of Lynne’s work feels like a missed opportunity. This is a dark story, for which her Glaswegian characters are too jolly and chipper: the Minister, especially, lacks the fractured, psychotic desperation to turn convincingly from Bible-thumper to murderous demagogue.
Miracle is framed by two other war-themed ballets. Kenneth MacMillan’s La Fin du Jour (1979) evokes the bright bubble of the interwar years, its jazz-age choreography etched with an acidic melancholy. Occasionally, MacMillan’s choreographic sophistications overwhelm the cast, and it’s in David Bintley’s Flowers of the Forest (1985) that BRB really shine. This kilted evocation of Scottish history – its romanticism and bloodshed – is one of Bintley’s finest, the choreography beating with the passionate pulse of its Arnold and Britten scores. All the cast take flight; the four principals, especially Nao Sakuma, are superb.
At Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 28-29 October. Box office: 01752 267222.
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