Recent Royal Ballet Reviews 'Sawdust and Tinsel' reviews

Watson is a First Artist in his first major role, but based on this and other recent work, he’s definitely going places. He’s an expressive and beautiful dancer with a long line and extension which combine with an air of vulnerability to demand attention. Relationships swapped over in a muddled fashion, although Page’s choreography made full use of Yanowsky and Watson in a free and open pas de deux. Such plot as there was seemed confused with Michael Nunn lurking in the background as a demonic ringmaster, and more than a few echoes of Manon creeping in, but the whole was intriguing, albeit slightly disappointing.

Among the "glamour girls" populating the stage, Nicole Ransley wriggled across the stage wearing feathers, tinsel and a wide grin, while Joshua Tuifua, a vision (of sorts) in pink and sequins, shimmied until his Bearded Lady got her man.

Las Hermanas is one of Kenneth MacMillan’s most powerful works, a half-hour adaptation of Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. A brutally monochrome set and intense music from Frank Martin’s Harpsichord Concerto set the scene for almost unwatchable frustration as the tension mounted on stage. Gillian Revie, Jane Burn and Mara Galeazzi were the three protagonists of the unnamed five sisters, with Sandra Conley ominous as their dictatorial mother. Tight, anxious gestures and steps expressed the fear and tension of these women trapped by convention and society.

The characters are far from monochrome. Revie’s ageing spinster was torn between the escape offered by marriage to a sleazy, caddish William Trevitt while a sanctimonious Burn was consumed with jealousy and rage against her situation. Galeazzi’s blatant desire to escape, or failing that, to at least sample life outside her repressed home, leads to the family’s downfall and her suicide. The climax, however, is not the discovery of Galeazzi’s dangling corpse, but the chilling moment in which Conley locks the door of the house, shutting out the world and its influences for good.

Las Hermanas is one of those works that hits you in the gut. Fortunately Raymonda couldn’t be more different. The full-length ballet isn’t in the company’s repertory, but instead, this glorious Nureyev version of the Act III divertissements could cheer up the most shell-shocked audience. It’s the perfect antidote to Las Hermanas, light, cheerful and sparkling with talent. Galeazzi, Revie and Burn all moved effortlessly from the intense drama of their preceding roles to this, while Laura Morera eschewed the fixed grins of classical works and genuinely looked like she was having a whale of a time. But the centre of this piece was Darcey Bussell and Igor Zelensky, authoritative in their variations. Bussell’s feet alone could turn an entire audience into fetishists and Zelensky’s leap is heart-stopping as ever. The man beside me construed accolades at the curtain call - "bravo", "brava" and "bravi". I knew how he felt.

This review originally appeared in Sunday Business on 8 November 1998.