‘God's Plenty’ reviews all Rambert reviews Rambert Performances

The work is in two acts, of about an hour each. We begin with a very long prelude in pre Christian times (Paul Liburd as a potent shamanic figure) followed by a medieval Crusades episode, before we reach the first dance inspired by the tales (a lady and four suitors): it’s only after this we reach Chaucer’s Prologue, where all the characters are introduced by a narrator. The second act consists of episodes from the Knight’s tale, The Wife of Bath, and the Miller’s Tale.

Bruce’s theme is relations between the sexes: we see anything from stories of courtly love, devotion, adultery, rape and violence. But this is somehow too generalised and unfocussed to bear the weight of the production: it’s an episodic experience, lacking any central figure to hold the attention throughout, and this is as true of the dance experience as of the narrative. There are some interesting pure dance moments: sometimes touching (Patricia Hines as a lonely and frustrated wife left behind), sometimes more aggressive (the battle of Theseus and the Amazons - fierce combat depicted without weapons, followed by the melting of Theseus and Hippolyta from warriors into lovers) - but these are isolated from each other and lack some essential coherence. It’s as if Bruce, unusually, doesn’t trust the dance on its own enough to carry the message: the singing fits in well enough, but the speeches of the narrator seem especially jarring and intrusive.

Sometimes the attempts at humour just come across as rather juvenile. The lager-lout crusaders must have seemed a good idea in rehearsal, but the joke wears thin rather quickly. The presentation of the unsuccessful suitor in the Miller’s Tale as a Riverdance-style dancer is funny for the first few minutes, and the jokes about bums and farting (all there in the original text) should appeal to 16 years olds. They may form a large part of the target audience: Chaucer (though not necessarily the Miler’s Tale) always used to form part of the A level syllabus, and this production might be structured to appeal to harassed English teachers wanting to persuade their charges that he is really much more fun then they imagine.

Rambert’s dancers work hard through several changes of role and costume, but don’t often have enough pure dance material to get stuck into. Paul Liburd and Didy Veldman as Theseus and Hyppolyta had great presence, and Miranda Lind looked game for a few more husbands as the Wife of Bath. The production looks very handsome, especially the costumes in every shade of red for the medieval scenes. The sliding panels of the backdrop, which allowed some of the action to be played in silhouette, were much admired by many in the audience: I found them something of a distraction. The fact that the mechanism broke down for ten minutes in the second act wasn’t a recommendation either.

The work has been the result of a long collaborative process, and one can’t help wonder if its episodic nature was the result of too many ideas being developed and not enough being ruthlessly discarded en route. Rambert are right to experiment: not every experiment works. It would be a great shame if the lack of success of one production affected Rambert’s ability to try out new ideas in the future. It was an almost full house: the performance received a warm reception, but by no means as passionate a response as Rambert productions have received there in the past. The two triple bills to come in the next week may show us more of the Rambert we are familiar with.