SALOME

6/7/10, Covent Garden

ROH production by David McVicar revived with Angela Denoke as Salome, Johan Reuter as Jokanaan, Gerhard Siegel as Herod and Irina Mishura as Herodias.

Seeing both Salome and Semele within a week leads to the inescapable conclusion that girls whose names begin with S and include L, M and lots of vowels are best avoided in real life, but they're god's gift to opera composers.

Strauss's psychological study of erotic obsession just about makes the heroine's transition from bored little rich girl into murderous maniac convincing. The music helps a lot. Like Janacek Strauss sets words to music very carefully and closely. The only tunes in this are in Salome's dance, though there are hints of melody in Jokanaan's prophecies. Surtitles don't quite make up for the lack of immediacy you'd get from words you could hear and understand instantly, but sitting through this in the days before surtitles must have been torture, since the words are so vital.

Set in the basement of Herod's palace, where soldiers lounge and the female help are naked (or nearly so) at the start and the tiles are stained. The soldiers' uniforms are vaguely World War Two and the women's clothes flapperish. The piece as written is mildly anti-Semitic, but there's a tendency for modern directors to give anything with a Jewish connection overtones of the Holocaust, and this is no exception. Is this some sort of concentration camp? Are the women abused? Have the soldiers been extracting sexual favours by force? It turns out, once they have (very slowly) dressed, that they're simply maids, on the staff.

Upstairs the posh folks are at dinner. From the Upper Amphitheatre only their chair legs were visible below the top of the proscenium. Mentally I'd started drafting my furious letter to Covent Garden's management about such dismissive treatment of those of us in the cheap seats. But soon the jaded toffs descended a great circular staircase toplit by brilliant moonlight to slum it in search of thrills down in the basement/on the main stage where even those of us in the gods could see them.

Salome, in a long white dress, comes first, goading the captain of the guard with teasing hints of sexual favours into letting Jokanaan out of his cistern. She demands to touch his body, touch his hair, kiss his mouth; he rejects all three. The captain, in an implausible touch, kills himself at this evidence of Salome's contempt.

Enter Herod and the rest from the banquet, demanding Salome's return. When she refuses they set up shop downstairs with a bunch of waiters, half a dozen bickering Jews (they can't agree on whether mortals can see God), a drunken topless girl and the soldiers. There are a good many singing parts but even more non-singing: Dr T thought the non-singers were well-handled and well-integrated into the action, unlike the pointless scurriers at Idomeneo the other other night.

The dance wasn't the usual genteel striptease (though Ms Denoke has the physique for that) but a curious glimpse into Salome's tortured sub-conscious. The set and the rest of the cast melted away for the duration. She and Herod mimed and danced through a series of rooms. The rooms were represented by walls and doors that travelled across the stage at right angles to the audience from stage right to stage left, with a bright light shining from stage left. In some of the "rooms" a huge video projection was thrown onto the back wall, of a woman's naked back or a doll or a zip being teased apart, and each room came with props (mainly clothes) manoeuvred on and off by the maids. In the first room was a chair and a doll: Herod sat on the chair and Salome sat on Herod. In a later room Herod helped her on and off with a white party dress, dancing with her when it was on. Intimations in all of this of incest and child abuse, presumably.

After the dance Herod tries hard to wriggle out of his promise to Salome when she repeatedly, stonily demands Jokanaan's head on a platter. He rows with Herodias, played as a monstrous Margaret Dumont-like figure in a bright blue ballgown with a tail Mishura had to keep flicking imperiously out of the way with her foot (especially when dancing with Herod).

The executioner, who has been standing by throughout dressed in a greatcoat with a huge sword, discards the coat and descends naked into the cistern to sever Jokanaan's head. (It's a psychoanalyst's wet dream, this opera.) Super musical atmospherics here and at many other points: film composers owe a lot to Strauss.

The head proves to have huge amounts of blood in it, which transfers itself gorily to Salome's white shift as she cradles the head and sings madly for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. Until at the end Herod can take no more and in the closing seconds orders her dead.

Powerful stuff, well-staged, well-acted, well-sung. We look forward to Oscar Wilde's original at Hampstead in a week or two.

POWDER HER FACE

30/4/10, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (Linbury)

Thomas Ades' famous (notorious?) opera about Margaret Duchess of Argyll, aristocrat, good time girl and fellater of headless men.

It's a fascinating story, full of sex, betrayal, breathtaking arrogance, though lacking drama: a straightforward rise and fall. We loved the staging. There was a vast staircase filling almost the whole of the downstage and sweeping up and narrowing to a doorway at the top. The Duchess (Joan Rodgers) made her first appearance (and several subsequently) from a giant powder puff halfway up the stairs stage left, which revolved and opened to reveal her. Her husband/lover/nemesis (the bass baritone Alan Ewing) made dramatic entrances from the door at the back, which slid open and shut. The other two cast members, the tenor Iain Paton and soprano Rebecca Bottone (again) scurried on and off as a succession of domestics, hangers-on and lovers. The action spanned decades from a present-day flashback to the Duchess's arrival on the scene in about 1930, through her notoriety during the 40s and 50s, and then the divorce and impecunious decline in a succession of hotel rooms during the 1970s and 80s (though for some reason the dates flashed up on a counter above that doorway didn't tally with the actual dates of her story as spelt out in the programme).

The problem was that, with the exception of a few numbers (like a popular song parody sung by one of the hangers on in the 1930s segment), the music seemed more of an obstacle than an aid to understanding as with so much contemporary opera. That's partly because you can't hear many of the words, so demanding is music like this to sing; partly because Ades' stuff, though much more accessible than some composers', is often hard on the ears.

MACMILLAN BALLETS

24/3/10, Royal Opera House

Three short Kenneth Macmillan ballets (including his last, The Judas Tree, created in 1992) revived as part of the Royal Ballet's season devoted to the man.

I missed the first, Concerto.

The Judas Tree was second: a dark work, in which a bunch of building workers disport (if that's the word) with a young woman, carried on under a sheet apparently dead, who then comes to life and flirts with them, teases them, is attacked by them, gang-raped by them and has her neck broken by the foreman.

Dark, disturbing and rather disturbed. Also muddled. The doll-like girl's neck is apparently broken twice by the foreman; the second time she comes to life, under the ministrations of one of the foreman's assistants, who movingly and cleverly picks her up, tosses her around like a ragdoll until she acquires a life of her own.

Much posturing and dramatic leaping by the men: I think you're meant to be able to smell the testosterone. Dramatic, dissonant music by Brian Elias, of whom we had never heard.

Leanne Benjamin danced the woman, brilliantly (to my untutored eye), though I thought I spotted a mistake early on when the three principal men were dancing together in a circle and she was trying to break in: she's supposed to lean forward, grasping for their hands with one of hers, while her back leg extends out behind her; she did this twice, successfully, but at the first attempt she seemed to misjudge it, they collided with her and knocked her off balance. Or maybe that was meant to happen.

Carlos Acosta danced the foreman (who hangs himself from a handy piece of scaffolding at the end). He got some applause when he came on and unlike the other men, dressed in various shades of workmen,s blue, he stood out in a white T-shirt; but it seemed to me that he had if anything even less to do than the other two leading men, and S (who knows about ballet) said afterwards that the applause was silly and that he was past his best.

The applause at the end seemed to reflect that judgement, with loads for her and not much for him and he graciously stood aside to let her take the spotlight. (But Lord, they do milk their curtain calls at Covent Garden).

The third work was Elite Syncopations, created in the 1970s to the music of Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers, when Joplin was all the rage in the wake of The Sting, and which I remember seeing with the parents when first unveiled. I loved it.

It's showing its age. Lots of dancers in brightly-coloured catsuits being variously cute, coy, outrageous; lots of striped waistcoats and bowler hats; the band on stage at the back conducted by the pianist and playing this most engaging of music with absolutely no sense of swing whatever -- it sounded like tuneful sludge.

Some spectacular dancing but I kept thinking of Cats, which was presumably a populsit rip-off of what was already, to be fair, a pretty crowd-pleasing kind of show.

Chiefly remarkable for some staggering dancing by Sarah Lamb, who can do things with her legs which ought to be impossible.

ROMEO AND JULIET

13/2/10, Royal Opera House Covent Garden

Written by Penelope
The story of Shakespeare’s doomed youthful lovers has been popular for more than four hundred years, so it’s remarkable to realise that it’s only been performed as a ballet for less than fifty. Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography and Prokofiev’s evocative score feel like they’ve been around almost as long as the story.

This season the Royal Ballet uses several well known dancers to play the principal roles. We saw Sarah Lamb as Juliet and Ivan Putrov as Romeo. And it’s Lamb who steals the show. MacMillan deliberately left the dancers to choose how to interpret the music and the mood, he didn’t strictly choreograph every single step and movement. It was fascinating to see how Lamb’s body changes as the play progresses. At the start she’s an awkward, shy 13 year old Juliet. She’s introduced to a suitor, Paris, and she’s all stiff limbs, with a straight body and a slightly gauche innocence. When she meets Romeo at the Capulet masked ball, she starts to fall in love and her movements become more fluid as they dance around each other, jumping, smiling and circling one another. The jumps and holds are smooth and there is a yearning in their bodies as they get to know each other.

The story takes place over only three days, and the couple fall in love quickly and we watch them dance after their secret wedding and night together. Lamb curls her arm around the back of Putrov’s head in a beautifully tender gesture. Gorgeous.

Once Romeo is banished, for killing Tybalt (an excellent ‘villain’ by Bennet Gartside), Juliet’s parents re-introduce the hapless Paris. Now she cannot bear to look at him or be touched by him. She keeps her limbs taut and straight.

At the end of the play, the two feuding families, Capulets and Montagues, are reconciled by the death of the couple. The ballet doesn’t give us a hopeful ending. We watch the heartbreak as Romeo believes a sleeping Juliet to be dead, and kills himself in despair. She awakes, too late, to find him lying there. Her moves are sensuous and she can’t stop touching him. She stabs herself and dies with her arm out towards him. Putrov is a perfect foil for Lamb, though he lacked the emotional intensity in the later scenes. She deserved the curtain calls and ovations of an entranced audience.

The Opera House orchestra were faultless, with the familiar surging Prokofiev strings in the Capulet ball. The costumes, from the original designs of Nicholas Georgiadis in the 1960’s were sumptuous – red and gold brocade, sweeping capes, beautiful puffed sleeves. Juliet begins in a pale blue little girl’s dress and then later wears a diaphanous ivory sheath. I’d seen the play, but I wasn’t sure how it would work without Shakespeare’s verse. I found that one of the most famous love stories ever written is also a beautiful, moving and memorable ballet.