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A Tale of Two Cities plays to Marston’s gifts as a storyteller and as ever with her work, knowledge of the source material is a must. She guides us back and forth between London and Paris, between the Ancien Régime and la Terreur, asking her audience to confront them simultaneously. She makes no moral judgements, but, like Dickens, uses the echoing space between these dichotomies –‘the best of times, the worst of times’ - to etch a very human story. Each of the characters is drawn with Dickensian spirit (though I think Mr Lorry, in many ways the lynch-pin of the novel – the stand-in for Dickens himself – must be much older and more prominent) and they have inspired Marston to some of her sublimest choreography, her trademark fusion of high classical and contemporary styles, the winding and un-winding of looping spirals seeming perfectly suited to a company in the finest form I have seen them. Where perhaps resources have not allowed her fullest scope is in the mob scenes – some of the most electrically vivid moments in the book – which lack brute force, but in the creation of Madame Defarge (played at the performance I saw by an incandescent Victoria Sibson) Marston has surpassed herself – the knitting movement as Defarge, like a Norn, weaves the destinies of men becomes slicing, stabbing gestures that suggest the sharpening of the guillotine’s blade.

Keiko Amemori as Lucie Manette and Tobias Batley as Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities
© Alastair Muir

Her collaborative team is that upon which she has come to rely on the most; her partner, the composer Dave Maric, Jon Bausor the designer and Ed Kemp as dramaturg. Bausor’s skeletal designs allow fluid shifts between places and times, its central image the wooden structure that finally moulds into the ‘movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history’. Maric’s score is luminous, painting the dance in richest colour, and is one of the finest new ballet scores I have heard, as good as that which Hans Werne Henze wrote for Ashton’s Ondine last century. The evening was a triumph – for Maric, for Marston – and especially for NBT, which has acquired a narrative ballet that does not sacrifice intelligence, nor craftsmanship and will give them (I hope) many splendid performances hence. It is Dickens truly ‘recalled to life.’