Triple Bill - Different Drummer/Chroma/The Rite of Spring

Published Monday 4 February 2008 at 10:35 by John Percival

Here’s a weird programme from the Royal Ballet.

Centrepiece is a revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s Different Drummer, based on Büchner’s Woyzeck: a strange, complex story. Without the words of the play or the opera, we cannot tell who’s who and what’s what, so the ballet makes little sense. Created in 1984, it failed to please even with two powerful personalities (Wayne Eagling and Stephen Jefferies) playing roles built around them as Woyzeck and the Drum Major who steals his woman. Sadly, the new cast, Edward Watson and Martin Harvey, prove blandly anonymous. Although touching and sexy, Leanne Benjamin’s Marie can’t save the show. MacMillan’s production provides unintended giggles in a corps de ballet of soldiers, bayonets fixed, criss-crossing the stage in grands jetés, or the hero drowning in a Victorian metal bath and pulling a wooden lid down over himself.

One merit was that music director Barry Wordsworth and the orchestra had fine although only marginally relevant scores by Webern and Schoenberg to play; a relief after the screeches and scrunching of Jody Talbot’s score for the opening ballet, Chroma. John Pawson’s structure for this is handsome, and I trust that Wayne McGregor’s choreography - leaps, twists and catches punctuated by stolid walking about - is less difficult and dangerous than it often looks. The cast (four women, six men) carry it off astonishingly well.

Finally, The Rite of Spring. Tamara Rojo makes the sacrificial victim look amazingly young. But MacMillan’s massed ensembles now look just abstract patterns; whatever happened to the anti-nuclear passion they originally displayed (manifest also in Sidney Nolan’s bomb-blast backcloth)?

Incidentally, especially opening on a Saturday matinee, the management’s failure to advertise the programme as totally unsuited for children is utterly unforgivable.