La Fille mal gardée at the Royal Opera House sounds very French and a bit naughty. But Frederick Ashton’s ballet could not be more English and pure. Set in bucolic England, it was, at its premiere in 1960, a pleasant antidote to all the kitchen-sink dramas on stage and film.
The ballet, pretty and charming, sweet and innocent, lyrical and sentimental, whimsical and farcical, was an immediate success with critics, the public and especially little girls who love Shetland ponies. Marie Rambert hailed the ballet as the first great English classic.
A widow’s daughter falls in love with a young farmer and thwarts her mother’s plans to marry her off to the idiot son of a wealthy farmer.
Undemanding for the audience, Ashton’s choreography is, notoriously, extremely demanding for the dancers. The production is excellently danced. Natalia Osipova is very girly. Steven McRae is very boyish. Evenly matched, fleet of foot, they make a tender and affectionate couple. They have a sense of humour. There are some dazzling leaps and spins, pirouettes and levitations. There are also some delightful dances with scythes, sticks and particularly pink ribbons which are put to a variety of pretty uses. The lovers, twining and ducking, create a cat’s cradle. The maypole dance is expertly executed. The cockerel and his hens are straight out of a 1930s revue.
Some may find La Fille mal gardée just a bit too twee, but a far greater number of people are going to love it, and rightly so: it’s a happy, joyful occasion.
Confessional is an unexpectedly dull title for a play by Tennessee Williams, who has so often come up with some of the most original and poetic titles, such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.
Williams’s one-act Confessional (1970) is an earlier version of his Small Craft Warnings (1972). Eight sad and lonely characters in a Pacific Coast bar in the 1950s address the audience directly in a series of monologues. The characters are life’s flotsam and jetsam, and things get pretty rowdy and tearful.
Jack Silver’s semi-immersive production transfers the action to a present-day pub in Southend. With the dialogue spoken in English accents, the voices don’t sound like Tennessee Williams. The Southwark Playhouse studio has been converted into a seedy pub, with actors and audience sharing the same space. The setup and lack of focus can be distracting, and it certainly doesn’t make this bitty play any more coherent and real. The actors evidently act it differently every night, as the mood takes them. Lizzie Stanton was abrasive and volatile on the night I went.
Mart Crowley’s once highly popular American comedy, The Boys in the Band, the first play in which all the characters were openly homosexual, premiered in 1968, before the advent of Aids, and is now very much a period piece, dated and overheated. Well acted in Adam Penford’s production at Park Theatre, Finsbury, it arrives just in time to be a companion piece for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which is about to be revived at the National Theatre and which is set in the 1980s.
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