Zoë Anderson
THE ROYAL BALLET
75 years
352pp. Faber. £20.
0 571 22795 3
The Royal Ballet is seventy-five, and right on cue comes a new book, The Royal Ballet: 75 years, by the first-rate dance critic Zoë Anderson. Fifty years ago, Mary Clarke, doyenne of British critics, wrote a superb account of the company’s first quarter-century (she is one of the two dedicatees of this new book), and twenty-five years ago, Alexander Bland surveyed the first half-century. You could say it’s a tradition. But then, to a large extent, the Royal Ballet is itself about tradition – not dance tradition per se as much as its own tradition; about celebrating any milestone or birthday or anniversary it can come up with as an excuse for a gala or a tribute, with all the obligatory ovations and speeches and deluges of flowers. (Anderson: “The Fonteyn gala was a moment of blissful nostalgia, one of the Company’s family celebrations”.) An American like myself can’t share so wholeheartedly in all the nostalgia, particularly when it’s connected to royalty. I remember taking Margot Fonteyn to a New York City Ballet opening night at Covent Garden many years ago and being presented to Princess Margaret by the Dame, who, for all her common sense and devotion to the art she ornamented, seemed more caught up in this exchange than in what was happening on stage. But then Fonteyn was never really a Balanchine devotee.
As with most success stories, the early years of the company – the years of struggle – are the most interesting. The company’s begetter, Ninette de Valois, was a formidably determined woman. She’s a wonderful subject, and Anderson does her proud. Ninette, of course, was no more a de Valois than I am – she was an Anglo-Irish girl named Edris Stannus, born in 1898, who by the age of fifteen was performing with “the Wonder Children” at countless seaside resorts. Anderson quotes her as saying that she danced the Dying Swan on every pier in England – “dying twice nightly”, because she was always sure of an encore. She went on to study with Edouard Espinosa, with Cecchetti, with Legat, and in 1923 joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with whom she spent two years – the years that constituted her real apprenticeship. (She was a strong, speedy and witty dancer, apparently at her best in roles like Coppélia’s Swanilda.)
Unlike so many of the Diaghilev crew who stayed on until his death in 1929, de Valois left him in 1925 to pursue her own goal: to create a true British classical ballet company. That she succeeded is highly impressive; that she succeeded in fewer than twenty years is all but miraculous. How did she do it? The time was right, she identified and shanghaied the right collaborators, and she had the right character and temperament. She was fierce, relentless, and implacable: “As serious as God and touchy as Hell”, as one admirer put it. And she had the intelligence and the luck to ally herself at the start with another woman of extraordinary capacity and steel, Lilian Bayliss of the Old Vic, who gave de Valois her chance.
From the old Old Vic to Sadler’s Wells to Covent Garden was the geographic trajectory of her company, but the trajectory that really mattered was the evolution from a school (like Balanchine in New York, de Valois understood that everything came from training) to a fledgling company given credibility by its one unquestionable star, Alicia Markova, to a full-scale ballet company capable of creating its own stars, notably Fonteyn. But Fonteyn, crucial as she was to the enterprise, was less a collaborator than a weapon in de Valois’s armoury. The true collaborators, without whom there would have been no Royal Ballet to celebrate today, were Constant Lambert and Frederick Ashton.
Lambert gave the company its musical and its intellectual leadership. He was not always an easy man, but he was brilliant, and generally right. Anderson quotes at length a 1936 letter from him to Ashton about Ashton’s upcoming ballet, Apparitions. In one paragraph he places the very young (seventeen) Fonteyn, whom Ashton did not as yet appreciate: “Though obviously immature at the moment she is to my mind the only post-Diaghilev dancer, with of course the exception of Toumanova, to have that indefinable quality of poetry in her work”. (Lambert would go on to be Fonteyn’s lover and mentor.) In another, he coolly characterizes an important company failing: “All the Wells ballets suffer not only from being put on too quickly but from being too cut and dried. The best Diaghilev ballets were always the result of a long and close collaboration between the artists and boring though this may be I am sure it is necessary”. It was Lambert himself who was the essential collaborator; that he was also a superb and original musician was another instance of de Valois’s great good fortune. (At the beginning of the famous New York season in 1949, both Balanchine and his partner Lincoln Kirstein were convinced that it was Lambert in the pit rather than Fonteyn on stage or the Messel décor who assured the company’s triumph.)
Then there was Ashton, who had been making ballets for Marie Rambert and the Camargo Society when de Valois took him on. Today we see him as one of the two great choreographers (with Balanchine) of the era, but back then no one could have guessed what he would become. De Valois provided the bulk of the company’s repertory, creating far more ballets than I was aware of before reading Anderson’s book – works with titles like The Jew in the Bush and The Scorpions of Ysit that I’d relish knowing more about. But de Valois’s ballets are gone with the wind, give or take a rare performance somewhere in the world – usually of Checkmate. It was Ashton who proved to be the company’s conduit to artistic greatness. Ballets from the 1930s, like Façade (originally made for the Camargo Society) and Apparitions and Les Patineurs, were hits, establishing his reputation. Then, after the war, came Symphonic Variations, Cinderella, La Fille Mal Gardée, Daphnis and Chloë, The Two Pigeons, The Dream, Monotones, Enigma Variations, A Month in the Country, the triumphantly kitschy Marguerite and Armand, and many others – a roster of works without which the Royal Ballet would hardly have mattered, apart from its recensions of the classics (in which Ashton also had a hand). Anderson makes the essential point:
“His style was individual and characteristic, but its classical temper meant that qualities learned in Ashton’s ballets could be carried over into Petipa’s. Dancing these ballets side by side, the Company could develop a consistent style.”
And what did that style consist of? Essentially, purity of line (exemplified by Fonteyn), musicality (the gift of Lambert), exactness (de Valois), and dramatic conviction, most obviously manifested by Robert Helpmann. In the performances of the 1950s and 60s as we remember them, or in films made of them, one finds unforced charm, a kind of decorous lyricism, and what Anderson calls a concern for characterization. I believe she grasps the extent to which the very different style of Ashton’s successor, Kenneth MacMillan, being less compatible with Petipa, contributed to the slow slippage of the company’s classical standards during the years of MacMillan’s leadership and after, but she finds it hard to blame him. Certainly she is far warmer in her appreciation of his work than most Americans would be. Back home, we drown in starry Romeo and Juliets and Manons, but that’s about it, while Ashton is having a welcome resurgence, despite the difficulties of his style for American-trained dancers. (Let’s not dwell on the neglect Ashton has at times suffered in his home company. Luckily, thanks to Anthony Dowell and now Monica Mason, that neglect is a thing of the past.)
MacMillan contributing so many ballets to the repertory was possibly a healthy phenomenon for the Royal; his adulterating its style turned out to have been a seriously wrong turning. In a piece called “The Royal at Fifty”, written in 1981, Arlene Croce put it succinctly: “The directors of the seventies – first Kenneth MacMillan and now Norman Morrice with MacMillan as principal choreographer – have turned English ballet away from its native classicism and toward the turgid expressionism in force on the European continent from Stuttgart to Amsterdam” and went on, more in sorrow than in anger, to note the company’s “partial turnout, lazy thighs, unstretched knees, sketchy footwork”. Anderson acknowledges the truth of all this, but would prefer to forgive MacMillan and put the blame on the disastrous reigns of Norman Morrice and Ross Stretton.
The history of the Royal Ballet can be thought of as a drama in three long acts. First, the crucible of the early years, with de Valois, Lambert and Ashton as the three gods of creation, and Fonteyn as their joint offspring and messenger to the world. Then the glory years of the move to Covent Garden, the triumphs of the Ashton repertory, the crucial American tour followed by international acclaim, the ascendancy to Royalhood, and – most important – the consolidation of the company style with all its elegance and confidence. Finally, the years in the wilderness after the founders had left the scene and their principles had been abandoned, followed by the coda of hope we’re currently experiencing. (It’s all too familiar to those of us who have followed the whole of the Balanchine enterprise – the random beginnings leading up to the official formation of City Ballet in 1948; the greatness of the company from the 1950s into the 80s; its artistic and moral collapse under Peter Martin.) Maybe this is the natural arc of artistic institutions; maybe it’s specific to ballet. But it’s a big story that begs to be told in a big way. Anderson’s way is micro rather than macro. The big picture is never really painted, because she is so committed to giving us a chronicle of everything and everyone, season by season – this happened, and then this happened and then THIS happened:
“After [The Three-Cornered Hat], La Boutique Fantasque came as a disappointment. Massine no longer had the suppleness for the celebrated Can-Can. His partner was Shearer, lively but miscast. She was to work with Massine again that summer, making the film The Red Shoes. The third Massine revival came early in the 1947–8 season. Mam’zelle Angot had been made in 1943 for American Ballet Theater, where it had not lasted long. The Sadler’s Wells production was substantially revised, with delightful new designs by Derain. The Barber was Grant’s first leading role. His buoyant appealing performance was an immediate success. Fonteyn soon withdrew from the title role. She was out of her element in Massine, though her performers had admirers. She was replaced by the vivid Julia Farron.”
And so on. Although passages like this are filled with useful information and represent an immense job of research, they read like a series of communiqués, not as elements of a fluent narrative. Anderson’s meticulous chronicle may have been what was expected of her by her publisher or by the company itself (she was chosen, I believe, by its administration). The result, however, is a book that is more reader-useful than reader-friendly, and surprisingly undramatic, considering how she stresses de Valois’ belief in dramatizing and champions MacMillan’s strong dramatic instincts. She underplays tense or difficult moments and situations – like the famous betrayal of Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, for whom MacMillan choreographed Romeo and Juliet, but who were denied the opening night in favour of the favourites, Fonteyn and Nureyev. She sidesteps the dissatisfaction of Moira Shearer and Nadia Nerina and Svetlana Beriosova (and others), whose path to the top was blocked by de Valois’s fanatical devotion to Fonteyn’s career.
On the other hand, she is very clear about the disagreeableness of Michael Somes as a ballet master. “Somes’s rages were notorious. ‘When it was full moon, we all knew we were in for it’, says [Merle] Park matter-of-factly”. “‘He used to wreck people’, said Donald MacLeary.” (He was also, as Anderson makes clear, a major force for stability and conserving the tradition.) She doesn’t hesitate to call the 1984 revival of Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial “perhaps the greatest disgrace in Royal Ballet history . . . . No one took responsibility for the production, which was under-rehearsed and badly danced, a shocking revelation of the Company’s technical weakness”. Nor does she show mercy to the blessedly short regime of Ross Stretton, who “filled the repertory with second-hand duds”.
The weaknesses of Anderson’s book may stem from the fact that she is primarily a critic and, despite the assiduousness of her research, only secondarily a historian. It is not her fault that for the company’s first half-century she has had to depend on second-hand reports – she wasn’t there to judge for herself. But her book springs to life when she can begin reporting what she has actually seen. Then, her acuteness as an observer and her refined judgement take charge and always illuminate. About Ashton’s Cinderella: “In their pas de deux, Ashton again used low, skimming lifts. As her prince lifts her, Cinderella sweeps her legs together in a scissoring movement, a trembling beat, like a shiver of feeling”. About Nureyev: “His finest work as a producer came early in his career; each time he staged Raymonda, it had more Nureyev and less Petipa”. About Makarova’s staging of The Sleeping Beauty: “It was as if this court, these fairies, thought it was bad manners to notice the difference between a 4/4 time and a waltz”. About Antony Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading, “full of things that people do in ballets, rather than convincing an audience that this is what these dancers do in this ballet”. About Tamra Rojo, whose Manon was “A kitten with grand designs . . . a natural flirt entirely sure of herself and right out of her depth”. About the Swan Lakes of the 2004–05 season: “A new unity of company style became clear with Swan Lake, back after two years and improved almost beyond recognition. The corps of swans had developed a collective poetry. A current of energy flowed through their dances, held in the new pliancy of backs, the new clarity”.
Perhaps her most revealing commentary comes in a discussion of the failure of standards in the 1980s.
There are two films of The Royal Ballet in Romeo and Juliet, one made in 1966 with Nureyev and Fonteyn, the second made in 1984 with [Wayne] Eagling and Alessandra Ferri. Both give pictures of The Royal Ballet as a whole. The later film shows the dancers’ collective involvement in the drama – and records, amongst other things, the superb Mercutio of Stephen Jeffries. Yet the Company’s acting registers more strongly than the steps. In corps scenes, feet and turnout are slack; musical phrasing has been evened out by the dancers who lack the speed and strength to vary their attack. The 1960s dancers, with their clear upper bodies and quick feet, look ready for The Sleeping Beauty. The mid-1980s dancers do not. The strengths and weaknesses of the later Romeo exemplify a loss of consistency across the Company, across the repertory. The sense of drama and commitment remained, but the dancers were working from a weakened technical base.
It is this kind of close observation that gives us clues to the company’s real history – its artistic history rather than its documentary one. I can only wish that Anderson had been there from the start, so that she could have given us a complete running account – not of everything that happened but of what it was like, how it developed, and what it has all meant. But then she would have had to be even older than I am. “The Royal Ballet dates its existence from 5 May 1931”, she tells us, and I date mine from six days earlier. Which would mean nothing, even to me, if those dates weren’t what made it possible for me to intersect with the company on that first famous American tour. We were both eighteen. I remember standing in a very long line to buy advance tickets at the old Met, not quite sure what I was buying tickets for. As a result, I saw more or less the entire season – my first Beauty; my first Swan Lake; the first overwhelming impressions of Fonteyn, the only performer I’ve ever stood outside a stage door to cheer; the fascination of Shearer, Pamela May, Beryl Gray, Robert Helpmann, Somes, et al. It was a revelation. And because of the company’s frequent returns to America and my countless trips to London, I’ve somehow been able to track it in a more than casual way. Because I love it, and want to know everything I can about it, I’m grateful to Zoë Anderson for her estimable work and telling eye. I only wish that, in certain regards, she had written a different book.
