While splinters of Theophile Gautier’s 1841 original romantic version do pop up, Michael Keegan-Dolan’s contemporary reworking of Giselle delves into the deep, dark depths of the ballet’s psyche. The original pretty Rhineland village is replaced by Ballyfeeny, a dark place inhabited by a community of bastard lunatics and a stamping ground for the sexually depraved and psychologically disturbed. The inhabitants fight, fornicate and line dance, the curiously enjoyable stamping and kicking used as a dynamic base for the rest of their dance movement.
Bisexual teacher Albrecht’s treachery to his lover Giselle comes as her axe-wielding psychotic brother, Hilarion, forces her to watch him having his wicked way with Pat Dunne, the butcher’s son, down a dark alley way. It is Hilarion that performs the famous mad scene, performing a line dance of derangement, until he falls ridiculed and insane to the floor while Giselle stands mute in the corner.
The asthmatic Giselle, left with a weak heart and respiratory problems after her mother committed suicide and her father climbed a telegraph pole and never came down - he, incidentally, narrates the action from atop said pole - is quietly left to wheeze her way into the Land of the Wilis. Two deflating white balloons ressemble her lungs packing up until she lies dead at the centre of the stage.
Rising from her grave with a haggle of vengeful spirits - played by pasty faced stocky men in nighties who fire handfuls of grave dust fireworks into the shadow-lit stage - she dances with a rope noose and Albrecht. In their revengful massacre, the Wilis manage to murder Hilarion but Albrecht rescues Giselle by leading her on to a trampoline and leaving her to jump freely, finally unbound from gravital existance.
The tiny, fragile Daphne Strothmann is a well cast heroine but it is Simon Rice, playing the foul mouthed Nurse Mary, who is the screamingly funny comedy dynamo of the show. Grossly lewd and crass, hairy-backed Mary’s bald head shines above her Irish accent and stubble as she cavorts around the stage. A delightfully obscure narrative and a barrage of irrepressibly feisty, ribald and obscene characters make this performance brutally satisfying and one I would recommend.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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