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 Love, Heroism and Fate
in Ashton's works by Lynette Halewood |
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For a creator who is often thought of as light, frivolous, funny and entertaining, there are darker shadows that unexpectedly emerge from repeat viewings of many of Ashton’s post-war works. Under all the charm and the happy endings, there is a surprisingly bleak view of the progress of love and the fickleness of fate. Sylvia and Daphnis and Chloe both share common elements in the narrative, dealing as they do with the abduction of the heroine by a malign individual. In both cases, the heroine is rescued from her predicament by the actions of the gods, interfering in human affairs, and finally returned to her lover, whose role in this is to wait patiently for her return and play no active part in the rescue. In Daphnis and Chloe, the hero Daphnis, does not do anything particularly heroic. Indeed, he is only too ready to be distracted by the charms of the Bad Girl Lykanion. He is not around to prevent Chloe being abducted. He is easily overthrown by Dorkon and the pirates. He gets Chloe back, not because of any heroism or kind actions on his part, but as a result of the whim of the gods. Pan decides to rescue her and return her to her lover. At any moment, the story might have gone another way: what if he had take up with Lykanion and forgotten Chloe? Just how strong are the bonds of love exactly? What do Daphnis or Amynta do to earn their good fortune ? In Sylvia, it is more pertinent to ask the same question. At least we see Daphnis and Chloe happily in love together before the temptation and the abduction. In Sylvia, the heroine has spurned the advances of Amynta and killed him with an arrow. She subsequently falls in love with Amynta because Eros, god of love, has shot her in turn with his arrow. It is not her choice, but her fate. Love is sudden, fickle, dramatic, life changing, and arrives like a thunderbolt out of the blue. Again in Sylvia, the heroine must be rescued by the gods (in this case Eros), before being returned to her waiting lover. It is the women here, Chloe and Sylvia, who have the heroic role. They must be resourceful or pleading: but even then their heroism does not prevail, it is the intervention of gods and fate which is decisive. The fickleness and changeableness of love comes up again in The Dream. We are shown how the affections of the quartet of mortal lovers, despite their initial declarations of eternal love or indifference, can easily be switched around by the application of the juice of the magic flower by the hapless Puck. Love’s success, despite all the protestations, can be determined by fate and chance, via the actions of the immortals, rather than any deserving actions on the part of the protagonists. Here all is put right by the end of the ballet, and all end up with the partners they desire. But there is one moment, in the dance when there is a sudden confusion, and Demetrius and Lysander have ended up with the wrong partners. There are smiles and laughter, and then the proper order is re-established. It is a little moment which comes across so well in dance, and seems to be Ashton’s own invention, rather than derived from the play. What is Ashton telling us here? Why that last little confusion ? To underline just how fickle and unpredictable love can be, how it all might perhaps have ended differently ? Can love truly be relied upon, despite these happy endings ? One of the few Ashton heroines who manages to earn her good fortune and her success in love is Cinderella. But even she needs the help of fate, in the form of her Fairy Godmother. Cinderella’s act of kindness, in giving a loaf of bread to the beggar woman, when the rest of the family were unkind, is rewarded by the beggar woman transforming into the Fairy Godmother, who then sends her to the ball, where she meets her prince. Happiness here is still subject to the quirks of fate, though, and at midnight she is transformed back into her rags and must flee. When the Prince comes searching for her, it is telling that Ashton cut the passages that deal with the Prince’s journey around the world in search of Cinderella. There are no heroics for he Prince here. He is not put to any great tests. He simply finds Cinderella and all is resolved. There is something quite bleak in Ashton’s view of love. It can strike out of nowhere, as it does for Palemon, who sees Ondine emerge from a fountain, and who forgets all thoughts of his commitment to Bertha. When it does, the results can be arbitrary and terrible. I have never seen Ashton’s Romeo and Juliet (and revivals sadly seem unlikely), but I cannot help but wonder what element of the story of the star crossed lovers that spoke to him. Romeo and Juliet’s fate seems so arbitrary in some ways: it is pure bad luck (in the play) that Friar Lawrence’s message does not reach Romeo and he does not realise Juliet is not dead but asleep. I would be interested to know how brave and heroic a figure Ashton’s Romeo is. In the theatre, it is Juliet who is often the more commanding figure, who faces the greater test. The narrative of The Two Pigeons is in some way the inverse of Daphnis and Chloe. Here it is the young man who takes a positive decision to leave and pursue the gypsies and more specifically the gypsy girl. The Young Man is humbled, and returns. Here it is not a malign fate that intervenes, just human folly. But the underlying themes are still there – the fragility of love, how easily it can be undone. The eventual reconciliation is so touching because the two protagonists are no longer the same people – they are older and wiser and their relationship can never quite be the same. It may be tempting to see Ashton’s depiction of the fickleness of love as rooted purely in his personal experience in relationships, but it may not quite be so simple as that. Ashton’s only really direct treatment of strife and heroism, and what it means, is Dante Sonata, made during the early part of the Second World War in 1940. This was still before the full horrors of the Blitz. This is an outlier in Ashton’s work in every sense – the barefoot, expressionist style, the direct depiction of the struggle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In no other Ashton work will you see piles of writhing bodies which form such a powerful stage image, or the leaders of both sides shown as crucified. The message is that heroism is useless. Leaders of both sides die. Nobody wins. This is not the response to be expected at a time of intense patriotism and stress, but Ashton seems all too conscious of the death and destruction to come, and his humanity will not let him allow either side a monopoly on suffering. In histories of ballet in Britain, the second world war is often regarded as some unfortunate interruption, to be pushed aside in a few sentences while recounting the determination of the performers to continue in whatever circumstances. It would be easy to forget just how horrific those circumstances could be. The civilian casualties and destruction from air raids were immense, thirty thousand or so in London alone, and later in the war, the threat posed by V1 and V2 rockets with their distinctive sound overhead was intended to terrify the populace. Ashton’s own role in the war effort was a very modest one, interpreting aerial photographs for the RAF. Nevertheless, the experience of the war and of hanging on and doing whatever was possible, however small, was an important and life changing one. Death or survival in one of the raids must often seemed a matter of chance, a whim of capricious fate. Those surviving had a particular bond. It seems entirely explicable that Tudor was snubbed by some on his return to England after the war, which he had spent in the safety of America. The experience of the war does inform Ashton’s work, and not just in the obvious ways in Dante Sonata. Waiting does not seem to be a particularly heroic activity. Daphnis waits, Amynta waits, and Cinderella waits by the fire. The Girl in The Two Pigeons waits for her errant lover. But for Ashton’s audiences in England when some of these works were first performed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, waiting was something the population had plenty of experience of. For the duration of the war, lovers and wives had waited and waited, often without news of their loved ones or knowledge of their fate for months or years on end. Perhaps in that context, in a quiet way waiting and hoping were more silently heroic and deserving than they seem to us now.
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