DANCE: Mixed message from twinned troupes
THIS rare collaboration between the opera and ballet companies of the ROH illustrates, if nothing else, the impact of Wayne McGregor’s tenure as resident choreographer.
Henry Purcell’s “little” opera Dido And Aeneas is a jewel polished to reveal all its brilliant facets by McGregor’s treatment.
Against a set of ochre stone Dido (Sarah Connolly) waits with her maid Belinda (Lucy Crowe) for the arrival of Aeneas (Lucas Meachem), unaware that a sorceress is conspiring to wreck their union.
Purcell’s exquisite music pours out of the pit like honey and finds wonderful expression in Connolly and Crowe, who is terrific, especially during So Fair The Game, So Rich The Sport.
They conjure a real sense of female companionship that makes the tragic conclusion all the more moving.
Vocally, Meachem is a little underwhelming as Aeneas, though he has a noble presence.
But it is in the interstices of the work that McGregor really scores – the black-robed figure who walks slowly across the great stone lintel like an omen of death, the dance interludes whose sinuous contortions herald thunder and darkness, and the way Belinda wraps the hem of her dress around Dido’s slashed wrists.
The final image of a spectral horse fading in and out of clouds is one of the most beautiful and mysterious images I have ever seen.
Handel’s Acis And Galatea poses a greater problem. Scholars have categorised it as a masque and a serenade and the fact that rogue dramaturge John Gay wrote the libretto invites a revolutionary approach .
While McGregor has done some refashioning, he should have gone further. Using dancers in nude bodystockings as idealised versions of the singers is dramatically adroit, especially in the forms of Edward Watson (Acis dancer) and Lauren Cuthbertson (Galatea dancer) but he fails to resolve the uneven structure and the sudden lurches in tone.
The romance between Galatea (Danielle de Niese) and the shepherd Acis (Charles Workman) is defined by a bucolic sexuality and the Happy We is an extraordinary expression of post-coital joy.
Yet in spite of the Japanese-inspired painted backcloths it is rather dull to look at. Eric Underwood’s Polyphemus is not so much a dangerously lovelorn monster as a pathetic fat bloke.
And McGregor’s sense of drama deserts him when instead of crushing Acis with a giant boulder Polyphemus taps him on the head with a stone which might have given him a headache but surely would not have killed him.
DIDO AND AENEAS
VERDICT 4/5
ACIS AND GALATEA
VERDICT 2/5
THE ROYAL OPERA & THE ROYAL BALLET
Royal Opera House, 020 7240 1200, until April 20
