fri 29/03/2024

Birmingham Royal Ballet, Cyrano, Sadler's Wells | reviews, news & interviews

Birmingham Royal Ballet, Cyrano, Sadler's Wells

Birmingham Royal Ballet, Cyrano, Sadler's Wells

Bintley's Cyrano has a whale of a time with Rostand's melodrama

Lush, romantic storyballets are as scarce as hens' teeth these days, despite the longing of much of the ballet audience to see them. Not because they're too elementary for today's dancemakers, I'd guess, but because to make one with lively dancing characters (male, female, young, old, good, bad, rich, poor), with a flowing story, lashings of set opportunities and an atmospheric score, takes multiple theatre skills few choreographers now develop. David Bintley's Cyrano is one of these rare birds, a truly skilled family ballet with all of the above.

His treatment of Edmond Rostand's nostalgic 1897 poem is crammed with clever things, huge plumed hats, men in musketeer costumes, swordfights and good ballet in-jokes. Even the pas de deux, in the past Bintley's weakness, here go beyond the obvious to show undeclared feelings.

Plus, in the handsome figure of Robert Parker, the dancer-turned-pilot-turned-dancer again, Bintley has a natural-born stage star as Cyrano, who is Steve Martin, Erroll Flynn and your nice postman all rolled into one. There's no mail strike while Cyrano's around - all the way through this ballet he can't help writing and delivering letters, dozens of them. Usually letters in ballets are a disaster: you peer through your binoculars trying to read the writing in Mayerling, Anastasia, Enigma Variations, Liaisons Dangereuses, every one of them a McGuffin.

But in Cyrano the whole point is letters - letters that lovely Roxane thinks blushingly have come from the deliciously handsome blockhead Christian, but which have actually been penned by Cyrano, her guardian, who has a nose like an aardvaark, sniffing out florid phrases like termite nests. At the silliest and most enjoyable moment in this ballet Roxane turns up at the front line of the Siege of Arras, dressed as a cadette, and accompanied only by a vast trunk of letters.

Cannon are erupting around them, explosions blast the sky, but Roxane's got to get that trunk open to prove to Christian she'll never go anywhere without her mail. This causes a slow dawning of light in his long-lashed eyes, as he realises that, duh, he can't write, so someone else musta. His eyes slide around to Cyrano, who is helpfully billeted in the very same camp as him. Confused, he flings himself into the firing line and bounces back a second later, dead, clutching yet another letter he didn't write.

This is pure nuts, and it is what one goes to ballet to enjoy, as much as the great psychodramas about really weird people - but it takes great skill to pull off. How BRB have brought all that scenery with them in one lorry, Londoners can only guess and be grateful. A Bourbon hôtel with luxurious travelling theatre, a baker's shop stuffed with baguettes, a courtyard garden with stone portico, balcony and pillared gates, the front line, and autumn in a nunnery - all contrived with maximum substance and decreasing expense by clever Hayden Griffin.

And Bintley, who first did this story almost 20 years ago, with a disastrous absence of dancing in it, has come at it this time with a much lighter touch and a real love of musical comedy and dance theatre. Cyrano nonchalantly duels with an irate marquis while simultaneously flirting with a maid, Eric Morecambe-style. The bakers do a mock Rose Adage, pirouetting with pies rather than roses. A minute, myopic monk with a vast beard steals the show with his blundering (a hilariously inessential cameo for David Morse).

On the serious front, the quality of the love-letters is conveyed in some highly decorative and pleasing mime. The pas de deux for Roxane and Cyrano succeed in revealing the painful situation when a man loves a woman who loves someone else - while the duet for Roxane and Christian at the front line has a quite different unconscious physical confidence of a husband and wife in love. Parker, Elisha Willis and Iain Mackay are perfect in their roles.

Meanwhile, Carl Davis's score is like a spot-the-musical-reference quiz, bits of Giselle, Carmen, West Side Story piling over Mendelssohn, Smetana, Prokofiev-ish waltzing, Mahlerian clarinettage, echoes and hommages like Joseph Cooper used to do on Face the Music decades ago - and yet it cheerfully threads this all together into its own musical idiom.

As romantic melodrama goes, Cyrano lacks true panache - it needs a dying kiss between Cyrano and Roxane, for one thing. But in several ways beneath the surface, I think this is a rather exceptional piece of theatre work by a choreographer who fell in love with his material and used all his experience to have a whale of a time with it.

Performances continue at Sadler's Wells until tomorrow. Read Ismene Brown's review of the BRB triple bill.

Check out what else is on in Birmingham Royal Ballet's season. Check out what's on at Sadler's Wells this season

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