Four stars
Theatre Royal, Glasgow
The Scotland of August Bournonville's La
Sylphide is all low
mist, tartan drapes and lonely mountain backdrops. It owes a debt to the
romantic vision of Sir Walter Scott, takes character names from The Heart of
Midlothian and epitomises the 19th-century yearning for back-to-nature mysticism.
There's no shortage of tartan in Matthew
Bourne's Highland Fling either, but the Scotland we find here in this
modern-day reworking of La Sylphide is one of high-rise flats, pill-popping
nightclubs and the Krankies. The tartan spread over walls and costumes by designer
Lez Brotherston is kitsch and ironic.
This is why the show has been dubbed
Trainspotting: the Ballet. That's overstating the case. It's more Sharks and
Jets than Sick Boy and
Begbie, but there's no denying it's a grittier telling of this story about the
perils of falling in love with an otherworldly sprite when you could be
settling down for a quiet life with your fiancée.
Bourne, with the cool perspective of a 21st-century
cynic, even makes us question the reality of Sophie Martin's Sylph. When first
she appears to Christopher Harrison's James, as she wafts over the gents
urinals in the Highland Fling social club, she seems likely to be a
hallucination brought on by the stag-night drugs he's been taking.
Like her fellow sylphs, she is grubby and a
little sinister; more like a resident of a landfill site than an ethereal Highland
spirit. She could still be an illusion the next day when, bleary-eyed and hung
over, he sees her again and begins his fateful obsession.
With Bournonville's witch (danced by Brenda Lee
Grech) now a drug-dealing tarot reader who pushes James away from Katie Webb's
wholesome Effie, this is a version that sets the supernatural in a world which,
for all its cartoon tartanalia, is recognisably ours. By juxtaposing Donald
Whur's Yer Troosers, Auld Lang Syne and Lerner Alan Jay's Once in the Highlands
with the relentlessly chirpy score by Herman Severin Løvenskjold, Bourne disrupts whatever pull
towards romanticism remains.
The
work was last revived in 2005 by Bourne's New Adventures; this Scottish Ballet
production is the first time he has given a full-length piece to another
company. Choreographically, it's as likely to embrace the bump'n'grind of the
disco and the partner-swapping formations of the ceilidh as anything Bournonville would have recognised. It's at its weakest when
Bourne's drive for clear storytelling results in bluntly signalled silent-movie
gestures (the talkies caught on for a reason) and at its strongest in the
ensemble pieces of the second half. It's a middle-brow pleasure, but the sense
of fun is infectious.
Mark Fisher
Theatre Royal, Glasgow, until 4 May, 0844 871
7647, on tour until 25 May. Details: www.scottishballet.co.uk
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