© Richard Farley Ismene Brown (Telegraph) interview with Sir Peter Sir Peter Wright on Wikipedia Myasthenia Gravis Association recent BRB reviews www.brb.org.uk recent RB reviews www.roh.org.uk Graham Watts reviews

Amongst Sir Peter Wright’s extensive catalogue of awards and honorary offices is his Vice-Presidency of the Myasthenia Gravis Association. 18 years ago, this nasty, debilitating autoimmune disorder hospitalised him for four months, and took five long years of recovery: it also brought his directorship of the Birmingham Royal Ballet to an end that he felt was premature.

When we met at the Royal Opera House - in the midst of BRB’s 20th anniversary celebrations - it becomes clear from the outset that Sir Peter ‘hated’ giving up his role as Director just five years after leading what had been the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet (the Royal Ballet’s touring company) to its new, permanent home in Birmingham. “I could understand the Board’s reluctance to keep me on because I was very seriously ill and past my sell-by date but I wasn’t ready to give it up,” he tells me before adding that the company has been very lucky to have had the creative energy of David Bintley at the helm for the past 15 years (with Wright holding the honorary title of Director Laureate).

Reflecting upon the pre-Birmingham days of the touring company, which he had directed since 1975, Sir Peter says that they were rarely happy times: “endless things were going on and I was fed up with it all,” he says with meaning, citing the particular problem of not being able to confirm personnel until after the main company had made its decisions. But he also concedes that things might not have turned out so well, if he had been responsible for the early groundwork of moving the company to Birmingham: “I didn’t see it immediately – I thought that they were just pushing us out of the way and needed a lot of convincing – things were going on that I didn’t really know about in the early days – but as soon as I got involved and went to Birmingham and spoke to the City Fathers I could see that they really wanted to have a ballet company and were prepared to provide the security we needed”.

Although Sir Peter has achieved complete remission from Myasthenia Gravis, the illness has a well-documented fatiguing effect which seems to have had surprisingly little impact on his subsequent working life. He continues to be in regular demand – all around the world – for mounting his productions of Giselle, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty and Coppélia. “They come back all the time,” he tells me, “they’re eternal works and I can’t take the credit for them but my versions seem to keep going”. Sir Peter has just revived Sleeping Beauty for BRB and he seems especially pleased that “even though it’s 26 years old, in Philip Prowse’s wonderful designs, it still looks as fresh as new”.

His early inspiration for dance came at the age of 7 when Peter’s mother took him to dance classes “because it was rather the thing to do”. As the only boy in the class and being “quite good at it,” his teacher – Miss Gayford – suggested that the young Wright should go to a full-time dance school but his strict, Quaker father was having none of that. “He didn’t know anything about dance or the arts and was absolutely horrified.” Miss Gayford was hurriedly dropped from the Wright family itinerary (“my sisters were very happy because they hated it”, he recalls with a smile) and Peter was sent to Bedales, a boarding school in Hampshire, which had a strong arts and music tradition. It even had its own theatre where he was able to experiment with his first attempts at choreography.

The ballet bug lay dormant until the opportunity arose for it to strike again, at the age of 16, when his mother took Peter to see Mona Inglesby’s International Ballet. As the curtain rose on the opening tableau of Les Sylphides, with the handsome poet surrounded by beautiful girls in floating white dresses, Peter turned to his mother and whispered, “that’s for me!” The young man was immediately – and forever – hooked again and almost 60 years later, he’s able to describe in photographic detail this wartime triple bill of the sylphs with Fokine’s Carnaval and the long-forgotten Planetomania with Harold Turner as a dotty astronomer.

His father remained unmoved and Peter was sent back to Bedales with rigorous instructions to the Headmaster about who he was allowed to see; so he ran away! Rather seriously for the times, he absconded with a girl who also wanted to leave school. Together they stuck it out for three days in freezing February weather before being tracked down and this tenacity partially won over his father who told him: ‘if you’re going to do it you might as well get on with it but without my financial support.’ By a stroke of good fortune, his music master at Bedales - Harry Platts - had also been one of the pianists for Kurt Jooss’ dance school at Dartington Hall and he helped Peter to get apprenticed with the Ballets Jooss.

He stayed for three years (1945-7) - returning for another year in the early 50s - but realised that the modern dance training wasn’t equipping him with the skills and technique that he needed to develop and expand his career. His inspiration was Hans Zullig, a Swiss dancer at Ballets Jooss who helped Peter with his basic classical training: “I went to London and did musicals, reviews, films, anything….”. He worked with the American dance director, Michael Kidd, on the West End production of Finian’s Rainbow and appeared in the Alexander Korda remake of Anna Karenina (1947), starring Vivien Leigh. He also attended class every day with Vera Volkova at her West Street studios to build his ballet technique while making useful contacts: “I met Fred (Ashton) there when I was desperately in need of a job and he told me that Billy Chappell was choreographing a review at the Savoy Theatre, so Billy gave me a job in the show. There was lots of crossover from film to stage in those days. Robert Helpmann and Roland Petit were also going to Volkova then.” Petit offered Peter a job in Paris, which he declined.

After a year with the Metropolitan Ballet, Peter got a job with Alan Carter’s St James Ballet, which was funded by the post-war Labour Government to take ballet into theatreless towns. Although a small ensemble that didn’t survive for long, it was through this engagement that Peter first met John Cranko (who was choreographing a ballet for St James) and after persuading Peter that he needed to get a job in a proper ballet company, Cranko arranged for Ninette de Valois to come and see him perform at the Corn Exchange in St Albans.

It was not an auspicious introduction. Peter remembers performing in School for Nightingales - a ballet about a singing academy in the 18th century (“all wigs and beauty spots”) - dancing the role of a young man who broke into the school in search of pretty young girls (as opposed to his own real life adventure of escaping from a school with a pretty girl!). It was a hot summer night and Peter had very bushy eyebrows, which needed to be caked with soap before make-up could be applied on top. The ballet started and he could see de Valois in the audience but within minutes he was dripping with perspiration, taking the soap into his eyes. “I couldn’t see and obviously made a mess of the whole thing”. The next morning, he called de Valois’ secretary and was told that he wasn’t a “suitable standard for the Sadler’s Wells Company”. But, with the same determination that had overcome his father’s opposition, Peter insisted on having the right to be seen in class.

He knew that he needed to be better prepared and here another coincidence came to his aid. A friend from school, Arnold Pollack (who became the film actor, John Arnold) introduced him to Peggy van Praagh and she arranged for him to audition for the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet. As planned, he went along for class but there was no de Valois. He was told to return the following week but Madam was still absent. The Assistant Director, Ursula Moreton, told him to come again the next week. At the third attempt, de Valois was present but so too were 5 other boys trying out for the company. Peter remembers being “a bit of a rough mess, wearing a pair of old football shorts” and his competitors were all smartly turned-out “with hair nets and bands”. De Valois wasn’t there for long and Peter did his stuff – “I had quite a good arabesque and I could jump a little”. Having a surname beginning with W he was last to get Madam’s verdict: “all the other boys came out looking depressed, but she said to me (as his voice goes into a high-pitched impersonation of Madam) ’Sit down Wright – you’re just the sort of boy I’m looking for, but I haven’t got a place for you’”. She invited Peter to join the school. As a maturing dancer of 23 who had already performed with three companies he said he would have to think about it, to which de Valois replied: “You’re not going to think about it – you will take it or leave it, right here and now!” I asked if she knew that he was the same man she had seen dance almost blind in St Albans and, laughing, he quickly replied – “no, and I wasn’t about to remind her!”

As luck would have it, he waited just 6 weeks before getting a place in the company. He was very behind in ballet training compared to his contemporaries and so his Sadler’s Wells career included “lots of ballets and roles for which I didn’t have to be perfectly turned out or have perfect feet.” He did Act II of Swan Lake,” but I was never cast as the Prince, I was always Benno”. His favourite roles appear to have been in the new generation of contemporary ballets pioneered by John Cranko: he was the second cast clown, Moondog, to the role that Kenneth MacMillan created in Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool and Capt Belaye in Pineapple Poll. He also enjoyed dancing in Cranko’s Sea Change and Alfred Rodrigues’ Blood Wedding, which clearly appealed to his sense of theatrical drama.

Encouraged by Cranko, Peter started to choreograph in the mid 50s. Although younger than Wright, Cranko seems to have been something of a mentor, both for him and others of that generation –“John was very encouraging – marvellous for inspiring people to get the best out of their possibilities –it wasn’t de Valois who got Kenneth MacMillan to try choreography, it was Cranko,” he says with emphasis.

By 1955, Peter was married to the dancer, Sonya Hana, and the three month tours with 8 shows a week were playing havoc with his family life. “No-one co-ordinated the schedule,” he recalls, “we would go from Inverness to Bournemouth and then back to Aberdeen, only to find other ballet companies doing these places at the same time”. De Valois had a reputation for allowing her dancers to leave once and return, but not to make a habit of it. Peter had already left Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet three times and been taken back and so, when de Valois came to discuss his next year’s contract – in Plymouth, he recalls – he was apprehensive about asking to leave again. But, she said immediately: ‘you’re absolutely right – you shouldn’t have to cope with this touring life anymore and I’ve got just the job for you’. She needed a group of dancers to appear in the operas at Sadler’s Wells and gave Peter the chance to run this small company. He knew she was serious because “she called me by my Christian name which she’d never done before”.

Peter had already begun an involvement in pioneering dance for television. His first commission had been to choreograph the Mazurka and the Dance of the Hours in Coppélia, which starred Nadia Nerina, Donald Britton and Robert Helpmann. This was so successful that Margaret (Maggie) Dale persuaded Peter to do the TV Producers course and he was given £15 to make a programme. I’m so shocked by the amount quoted that I ask him to say it again and he smiles and says “I know, you couldn’t buy the tea now for the money that we were given then to make a 15-minute programme”. He offered two dancers £2 each to perform Cranko’s Beauty and the Beast and remembers that “I did all my homework and really made it work terribly well”: so well that the BBC offered him a full-time contract. But just as he was about to sign on the dotted line, Cranko called and asked Peter to come and join him as Ballet Master and Associate Director in Stuttgart. “He told me that he had to do everything and couldn’t cope. I said, ‘but John I’m about to sign this fabulous contract with the BBC’ but he said just come over for the weekend and see”.

Peter remembers that there were “terrible things happening in Stuttgart” at that time (1961) but that it was also “terribly exciting”. “I hadn’t signed the BBC contract and so I thought I have to give this a whirl - and thank God I did”. The Wright family was in Stuttgart for 3 years but educational issues meant that Sonya and their children returned to England in 1965, leaving Peter to remain with Cranko for another couple of years. “After 5 years”, he recalls, “I went back to the BBC and they remembered me. It was around the time that MacMillan had done Las Hermanas and so I proposed to televise this and redo Beauty and the Beast which they accepted on the spot.”

He found it difficult to work within the BBC because of the lack of artistic control he had become accustomed to in the theatre: “I couldn’t even choose my own designer,” he remembers, but despite these frustrations his film of Las Hermanas, which still exists, “worked very well in black & white and I had excellent dancers - Marcia Haydée, Ray Barra and Monica Mason”. He was tipped off that a reduced version of Cranko’s Onegin that he also made for TV was likely to win the prestigious Prix d’Italia. But, one of the judges asked if it had been done before. He replied that it hadn’t been done in this version for TV but the judge then asked “aren’t any of the steps the same?” and from that moment he knew that they hadn’t won.

It was in Stuttgart that Wright’s seminal reputation for producing the classic ballets was born when he staged his first Giselle, in 1965. Cranko had already choreographed Romeo & Juliet and made versions of both Swan Lake and Nutcracker and was exhausted. Stuttgart’s existing Giselle was produced by ‘Poppa’ Beriozoff (Nicholas, father of Svetlana Beriosova) but it was not liked and badly needed replacing. Initially, Wright resisted Cranko’s overtures to make a new Giselle. I’m surprised to discover that he didn’t know the ballet and had never danced in it; he never liked it in the Sadler’s Wells version although he remembered it vividly with Ulanova from the Bolshoi’s season at Covent Garden in 1956. Not only had he watched it in rehearsals but he confesses that “I used to go and hide in the gents’ loo at the Opera House with a book and then stand at the back once the House was reopened for the performance – there was no security in those days,” he said with a grin and I begin to realise what he means when he said that Madam liked “all the naughty boys”!

Cranko gave Wright free reign and 6 weeks to go to London and research Giselle, advising him not to get bogged down with tradition. He found it to be a “very exciting experience”, modestly adding that “it came off which led to people saying that perhaps I should do more”.

His 1987 version of Giselle for the Royal Ballet is very different from the Stuttgart Production, which is perhaps unsurprising when he tells me that there are now 14 of his productions of Giselle around the world, although no longer in Birmingham or Stuttgart. Each one is a tributary that follows either the 1965 or 1987 source. All of his productions are explicit in insisting that Giselle is a suicide which is why she is buried in unhallowed ground. However, Peter acknowledges that “some ballerinas don’t want to do that. They prefer the idea that she drops dead of a weak heart.” Peter also warms to the theory that Giselle’s father was probably one of the local counts: “that’s why she is different from the others - she has some blue blood in her veins”, he explains, adding that “Albrecht could simply be history repeating itself?”

His Giselle is now widely seen as a definitive interpretation of the great Romantic Ballet but he’s amused (in a good way) that in Munich, Mats Ek’s version sits alongside his own and sometimes they run them on the same day – with one as a matinee and the other in the evening.

I ask why restaging the classics became his forte rather than choreographing his own work. He says, “I was never like Cranko, Ashton, MacMillan – they had to get it (the choreography) out of their systems – I usually did it because there was no one else available – especially when I was Director of the touring company and you have to keep the dancers occupied with new work – you can’t forever keep reviving things.”

He regards Kurt Jooss’ Green Table as one of the great ballets and proudly tells me that there are over 50 productions of it around the world but he regrets that there is no version in either of the Royal Ballet Companies. Wright mounted a production for BRB when he was Director but it seems unlikely that it will be revived. He tells me a delicious anecdote about de Valois appropriating some of Jooss’ choreography. Apparently, Madam disliked Jooss because she felt he was competition and the Arts Council looked upon his company very favourably after the war. “She made out that she didn’t think much of his choreography but she once told me that she was so impressed with Jooss’ scene of diplomats arguing around the table that she put one or two of his moves into the gambling scene of ‘The Rake’s Progress.” But, he immediately counters this revelation to protect Madam’s reputation by adding that “Fred used to say we all pinch but we have to make the things our own – there are no new steps. It’s all about how you use them”.

This mischievous revealing of old secrets is soon replaced by genuine sadness when I ask how he felt about not being considered as the successor to Kenneth MacMillan as Artistic Director of the Royal Ballet, when MacMillan resigned in 1977, when he seems to have been the most obvious choice. There is a long pause before Sir Peter replies, hesitatingly: “I felt overlooked at the time, to be honest, although I’m not sure whether I would have done it….I don’t know, but, anyway, they didn’t ask me – I never got any signals from the Board or the Chairman……No.” A longer pause, before it all spills out: “I had a very bad time, you know, because when John Field stepped down I was pushed into being Administrator of both companies and I didn’t know anything about the Opera House– I’d always been at Sadler’s Wells…….I was just pushed into it and I had to do it. That’s when I really decided that I didn’t want to have to look after both companies…..it was killing me – I had an ulcer – there were orchestral problems, union problems, difficulties with dancers…..”. Another long pause before he summarises those long-ago feelings: “it’s vanity I suppose but I thought I should have been considered. People didn’t have the opportunity to throw their hat into the ring – up until MacMillan it was always a process of succession.” I’m left with the unequivocal feeling that this line of natural succession was abruptly broken just before Peter Wright’s turn but that the antidote to his unhappiness lay in leadership of the touring company and its relocation to Birmingham.

His response is immediate and emphatic when I ask what has given him the most satisfaction in dance: “Being a Director. Everything fell into place in that role and I was very pleased after the move. I finished up as director of a new company and I made it work – but I was terribly upset that I couldn’t continue as I had to retire because I was ill and there was so much more that I wanted to do”.

Throughout our interview, Sir Peter talks of ballet as theatre and he is clearly very keen that dance should go on expressing and communicating ideas rather than simply executing steps and virtuosity. He says, “ballet should always be entertaining theatre, whether comic, tragic or abstract. I find that many choreographers today are moving away from theatre and that saddens me”. When it comes to the classics, he is quick to acknowledge that his productions “are not my works at all; they are my versions of them and I try to be faithful to the creators. These days, some people do productions with different stories and their own choreographies and if it wasn’t for the music and the name they could be anything. .It’s terribly important to have narrative works and to communicate; dancers are not just there to show off their technique and line; their potential to express themselves is enormous. We must remember what Pavlova said: ‘classical technique is a means to a beginning – not an end in itself’”.

Now approaching his 84th birthday, there seems to be no end to Sir Peter Wright being in as much demand as ever. “In spite of the illness, I’ve kept going and have been busier since I retired. But now, I have to do everything for myself – I haven’t got that lovely staff to help me anymore. I’ve been very lucky in that people have wanted my productions overseas. The theatre is a very active, busy life and it’s very hard to just stop and do nothing”, he says in a way that suggests it might be nice to stop and do nothing from time to time.

As if to emphasise the point, when asked if he is staying on at the Opera House to see that evening’s performance of La Fille Mal Gardée, he tells me that he has seen Fille “rather a lot” and is looking forward to going home. After a brief pause, he asks if EastEnders is on TV that evening. When I say that I think it is, he confirms with a notable twinkle of enthusiasm that it’s a very good night to go home early!