© John Ross RB 'Serenade' reviews 'Serenade' reviews RB 'Rushes' reviews RB 'Homage to the Queen' reviews Acosta in reviews Whitehead in reviews recent RB reviews more Jane Simpson reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months) Gallery of Photographs

Rushes - Fragments of a Lost Story has all the hallmarks we expect of a Brandstrup production: music-driven choreography; strong and probably beautiful designs, cleverly lit; traces of his background in the world of film; and of course a story, never fully revealed. He works very closely with all his collaborators, even when they're not still alive to know about it - this time the sketches of a never-used film score by Prokofiev have been worked up, shaped and augmented by composer Michael Berkeley to give Brandstrup the music he needed, whilst their original fragmentary nature inspires the underlying format of the whole piece. The simple but very striking decor by Richard Hudson consists mainly of full-height bead curtains, which give depth and perspective to the stage picture as well as acting as shifting, shimmering screens for projected light and patterns.

Against all this we see the unfolding story of a man falling deeper and deeper into an obsessive relationship with a woman who doesn't care about him, ignoring the anguished concern of another woman, who does. We're only shown snapshots - it's like watching the disintegration of an acquaintance you see only every couple of months or so: you don't know what's happened in between, but it's painfully obvious on each encounter that the situation has got worse. Brandstrup's characters are the joint creation of himself and his dancers, resulting usually in such a close identification that it's impossible to imagine a second cast. In Rushes he's allowed two sets of dancers, working wihin the same framework, to produce quite differently inflected versions of narrative: one may perhaps resonate more strongly with some people than the other, but there's no way of saying that one or the other is 'better'. The man played by Carlos Acosta starts out as a strong character, directing his own life and choosing his actions until his obsession takes over; in the other cast Thomas Whitehead is weaker, tempted and teased by the woman until she pushes him too far and loses her control of him. Laura Morera and Tamara Rojo have the opposite balance - Morera the more passive - whilst both Alina Cojocaru and Leanne Benjamin play the onlooker with touching tenderness and despair, especially in the very beautiful closing pas de deux. Fine, intelligent performances from all of them, but leaving plenty of room for future casts to find new ways into the roles.

There's a corps de ballet too, a dozen couples who scarcely emerge as individuals. They dance at the back of the stage, often only half-seen in the shadows, and don't engage with the leading characters except as observers. I thought their choreography was perhaps the weakest link in the whole piece: Brandstrup gives them a lot of naturalistic movement and groupings, and those are deftly done and sometimes more than that, but the actual steps he sets, and especially the often-repeated lifts, look banal at times in the context the rest of what he's done. That's a fairly minor flaw, though, in a complex and fascinating work which I hope will find a lasting place in the repertoire.

It's quite hard to see anything in common between Rushes and Balanchine's lovely Serenade, which opened this programme, unless you subscribe to the idea that there's a fragmentary story hidden in Serenade too. Watching some of the famous incidents - the woman who arrives late, the one who falls - makes me think some of the dancers certainly think so: these tiny episodes can grow into mini-dramas of their own, though how they fit into the larger scheme of things I can never work out. The corps de ballet seemed to take some minutes to get going on the first night, and I've seen better overall performances from this company before, but there were still considerable pleasures to be had especially from the bright clarity of Marianela Nunez and the attack, speed and glowing confidence of Lauren Cuthbertson, in the best performance I've seen from her since her Juliet.

Homage to the Queen was revived, with mostly new choreography, for a royal occasion a couple of years ago: it seemed to me then a dutiful but empty exercise and detached from those celebrations it now feels completely pointless. The dancers do all they can but it's not enough.