Sleeping Beauty fails the modernity test

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL Sleeping Beauty Edinburgh Playhouse Run ended

THE final programme of the retrospective of Mats Ek's choreography shows just how far he has been willing to go in recent years in terms of reconstructing the classics. While his early 1980s Giselle is still recognisable as the fragile waif of the romantic version, in Sleeping Beauty his Princess Aurora has become a rebellious, heroin- addicted waster.

Although Ek retains the familiar names for many of the roles, what he has undertaken is nothing short of a complete rearrangement of the story and indeed Tchaikovsky's score, which is cut to ribbons and then reassembled to suit Ek's wishes.

It could have been exciting and remarkable in its boldness, whereas in reality it ends up looking a hotchpotch with a scenario that is largely impenetrable.

With programme notes that give almost nothing away, the audience is left bewildered at times over the time frame, the way in which single characters suddenly develop multiple incarnations, and a singularly pointless cookery lesson in the middle which was not redeemed even by topical allusions to Scottish and Festival issues.

It is also disappointing to see this talented company of dancers thrashing about on the huge stage, looking lost and aimless in a choreographic style that never truly invites the viewer into the story. There are moments with Ek's trademarks, bodies doubling over at the waist, feet running up walls, suggestive pelvic posturing, but it's all too often empty gesture here.

The fairy variations in the second half bring a welcome touch of humour and kitsch style to the proceedings, a relief from the heavy- handed attempts at a statement about racial tolerance which underlie Aurora's relationship with Carabosse, here incarnated as an Oriental junkie.

Asa Lundvik Gustafson is a powerful Aurora, rebellious yet ultimately pliable, but it is Josef Tran as Carabosse who is given most chance to show both technique and character in the role of unsuitable liaison for a princess.

With a running time of just over two hours, it feels a remarkably long sleep this beauty. Ek himself said that for a long time he couldn't find a way into his own version of the ballet, and it must be said that it shows. The characters do not engage us, not because of their dark sides, but because we never really learn who they are and the musicality so prevalent in earlier Ek works is painfully sparse.

Ultimately, the memory of the simplicity of the tale as presented in the classical ballet and its expression in the zenith of Russian Imperial choreography seem far more powerful images than the overly complicated, foot-stamping guddle Ek has served up.

Don Morris

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL Macbeth Edinburgh Festival Theatre

IT'S the delicate balance between tyrannical, murderous Macbeth, venomous, power-crazed Lady Macbeth and Hecate - the sinister evil force personified by the witches - which director Luc Bondy has lost in this production from Scottish Opera.

In the prelude to act one, he presents the witches as vulgar lasses whooping it up on a girls' night out. In act three, the point of fulcrum upon which the whole tragedy is hinged, they become positively farcical, pulling what resembles sausages and a cat out of a grotesque cadaver on a operating table.

To reduce act three to farce, with some of the audience laughing at the witches' comic antics, is to make a travesty of this, perhaps Verdi's most serious opera.

Throughout, the direction and choreography let the production down - while the paucity of set design might work if the presentation was not so static. At times the direction is nothing less than camp, with Kathleen Broderick bearing a startling resemblance to Vampira for the first three acts. Her singing, however, is gloriously suited to the role. Carsten Stabell (Banquo) and Marco Berti (Macduff) give sterling performances while Richard Zeller (Macbeth) sings with a sombre introspection which beautifully offsets the distraught forcefulness of Stabell.

Only in the final act does their singing falter as the production drifts from one anti-climax to another, culminating in Macbeth lumbering in and out of branches held by the cast during his supposed climactic confrontation with Macduff. This bears an uncanny resemblance to In And Out The Dusty Bluebells.

If it hadn't been so tragic I might have laughed.

Carole Danielson

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