The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 15

a a a a a a a a a a THE DAILY TELEGRAPH MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1997 15 Can the current craze for updating bring a fresh audience to the traditional ballet repertoire, asks Ismene Brown New looks for the classics Nunn shows off his big production values Theatre An Enemy of the People National Theatre gestively. Is he the person she the dreamed The atmosphere harks back to black- -and- white movies of the the 1940s, the period in which Prokof3 iev wrote his luscious. often erotic music. The context is realistic. vet of leaves the door of reason ajar like Powell and Pressburger tence that the water in the spa town is dangerously contaminated.

The effect. however, is merely picturesque. The play was written in angry reaction to the howls of outraged public morality that greeted Ibsen's previous drama, Ghosts. which concerned hereditary syphilis. And though Arthur Miller's famous adaptation turned Enemy of the People into one man's heroic struggle against a corrupt ruling class.

Ibsen's play, now nimbly translated by Christopher Hampton. actually takes us into more dangerous territory. Ian McKellen's Stockmann may look like: a delightfully unworldly nutty professor, all frets and fidgets, wayward hair and unfortunate cardigans, but by the fourth act he Objects of Vertu We are now collecting for our 4 November sale of Objects of Vertu, to be held at our prestigious London salerooms. For a Free Auction Valuation on one piece or an entire collection, telephone Isobel Muston on: 0171 393 3975 or send us a brief description of your item (s) with a photograph, if available A rare 'Castle- Top' Silver Card Case, Birmingham 1843. Closing Date: Tuesday 7 October Sold for 4 3,450 DESCRIPTION OF NAME ADDRESS POSTCODE TELEPHONE a to Joanna MacFarlane, Bonhams, Montpelier Street, London SW7 1HH BONHAMS ARTS ET US look at the list of are new major autumn.

productions promising Classic that companies after this our classic Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle and The Nutcracker. What with the Royal Ballet recycling its traditional classics in Hammersmith, has the time finally arrived for balletlovers in search of stimulation to switch over to hang gliding? Look deeper, and there is chink of light. All four classics have been stripped of their original choreography and rewritten for our times. Birmingham Royal Ballet is alone in launching a completely new ballet (David Bintley's Edward I1). It is as though companies have accepted the public's nostalgia refashioned to suit the performers' need dance something new.

Adventures in Motion Pictures' Cinderella is a child of the Blitz, City Ballet of London's Aurora learning about sex, Northern Ballet Theatre's Giselle is a prisoner English National Ballet's carats bored 1997 adolescent. We started all that, didn't says AMP's Matthew Bourne confidently. He is preparing for Friday's West End opening of Cinderella (at the Piccadilly Theatre) after an orgiastic summer in which his Windsor Swan Lake with male swans sold out in Los Angeles for eight weeks and turned Richard Gere and Michelle Pfeiffer giddy with adoration. Bourne is a little too arrogant. Undeniably AMP has had a huge impact in drawing newcomers be pleased by old fairytales.

But ENB's Nutcracker plans pre-date AMP's West End debut last year, and is known classics (including Cinderella). Updating classics is. in fact, long-practised sport. Memorably different versions include Dance Theatre of Harlem's Giselle. set in a Louisiana sugar-cane plantation, and John Neumeier's Sleeping Beauty, with a denim-clad boy on a bicycle as the Prince.

Freud, Logie Baird and Betty Friedan have had a bigger impact on ballet stagings than AMP. Sexuality is the central theme fairytales, and no generation more sexually confused than our own, nor so fascinated by covery. As AMP has made clear, self character and strong -telling are very important to the television generation. And the new post-feminist view that fairytales originated in female -telling has allowed people to take them seriously again. Bourne's Cinderella is a frumpy weirdo' in a monstrously selfish wartime family, headed by great Lynn Seymour in Joan Crawford mode as the stepmother.

Cinderella goes to Ball only in her dreams. In Act she finally gets her man, a fighter pilot (Adam Cooper, the star Swan Lake), but, says Bourne sug- TREVOR NUNN opens his account as the new boss of the National Theatre with this rare revival of An Enemy of the People. I'd like to report a terrific success and it's certainly a big splashy production. Alarmingly, however, it gives the impression that Nunn wishes he was still directing blockbuster musicals rather than Ibsen. Though the fourth act contains an epic scene of public confrontation, in which our hero, Dr Stockmann, stands up to a mob, most of the play consists of intense, intimate discussions in small rooms.

Working with his regular designer, John Napier, however, Nunn's production initially comes over like a Norwegian Oliver! without the Songs. Napier puts whole town on the Olivier stage, in one of his famous -level adventure-playground sets. It's a bit like the pirate camp at Legoland, all sails and barrels and recorded seagulls. We also get playful schoolboys and a marching band. I suppose the idea is to a tangible sense of the community that Stockmann is threatening with his insis- a it to is a of IS Picture: HUGO GLENDINNING Harold King's first act after lauching his new company from the ashes of London City Ballet.

was to commission an unknown young choreographer to tackle grandest score. to which Petipa had created masterpiece of classical ballet. Was that insanity. or artistic audacity Picture: HANSON New for old: Sarah Wildor and Adam Cooper (main picture) in AMP's Cinderella; Jayne Regan (above) as NBT's Giselle; and Kate Church (below) in City Ballet of London's Sleeping Beauty Picture: PETER TEIGEN of the kind we need much more of? With King's blessing. 28-vearold Michael Rolnick 1S taking awav City Ballet's pointe shoes.

though he hastens to explain that it is soft -shoe ballet. not "modern two that give boxoffice managers sick feelings in their stomachs. It is set in two Russias, one at the 1890s height of Tsarist imperialism and an imaginary equivalent today. Rolnick's approach is the product of a training at the Royal Ballet School (where he made his contemporary Darcey Bussell's first public solo at 15) and his later career with the magicalrealist of dance, Lindsay Kemp. wanted the freedom to use the dancers' classical abilities.

but also other movements that look odd on pointe. I am trying to be responsible to both the audience and the dancers not to be so radically different that they can't handle it. His most radical idea is that Carabosse is not purely evil. She is the fairy of "sexuality and whose gift to Aurora has potential for both good and bad. The Lilac Fairy represents 'reason and At the end, both Carabosse and the Lilac Fairy crown Aurora, who is now girl who say no, rather than one who.

as at the beginning. couldn't say It sounds very 1990s, but it is not early versions of fairytales were more darkly sophisticated than the candy-coated abridgements we know today. Giselle is perhaps the hardest ballet heroine to update. She is a naive. deceived underling whose main purpose is to be a ghost.

In his search for a convincing new context. Northern Ballet Theatre's Christopher Gable has wrapped her in barbed wire (touring from next Monday). He makes her a prisoner under 1930s military rule. and Albrecht a cheating soldier. her oppressor.

Her death unleashes concentration-camp visions. Logically it adds up. though how Gable will square it with Adam's cheerful music remains to be seen. Finally. there's Derek Deane's new Nutcracker for ENB.

which starts touring on November 13 and has been described as "Donna Karan goes to the ballet'. with little black 1997 dresses 111 Act 1 and classical tutus in Act 2. There is a mobilephone dance and special effects are promised. The striking common factor in these revisions is dramatic logic. But whether they change the viewer's life as good art should depends on two other factors.

First. the new choreography's power to express emotion and music. and to be beautiful in its own right. Second, something more elusive. A dance creation is not a play.

Logic is less important than magic for which (as the durable classical versions show) one will forgive inconsistencies. And magic depends on something unreal clinging to the scenerv. something to believe in or hope for, or so imaginative that it sets the spirit soaring even while the brain is protesting. It's the fourth dimension that is uniquely in dance's gift and the audience will be looking for it. to films.

A Matter of Life and Death being a particular inspiration. Bourne says. I just try and look for logical reasons for the story. I think our success is because people are relieved that they can follow the story even when we haven't said a word If Cinderella isn't a hit. the hard-headed Bourne Cal fall back on Swan Lake.

which is becoming an international franchising industry. City Ballet of London has no such financial long- stop. If its new touring Sleeping Beauty flops. it's all over for a company that has bounced back more often than a bungee jumper. REVIEWS Nor is Nunn able to disguise the mechanical way in which Ibsen charts Stockmann's progress from public hero to Enemy of the People.

McKellen's performance will undoubtedly find some admirers. It's busy. even virtuosic, ranging from whimsical good humour. through mental chaos to fanatical resolve. But this is curiously external acting and I was entirely unmoved.

even during the most heavily signalled moments of distress. The usually excellent Penny Downie can make little of Stockmann's dull wife, and Lucy Whybrow has an equally tough task with his saintly daughter. Stephen Moore offers terrific value. however. as Stockmann's brother.

the devious mayor, while John Woodvine creates a richly comic impression of smalltown pomposity as the printer Aslaksen. This certainly isn't a disastrous start to Nunn's regime. but I hope there will be more substance and less directorial flash in the work to come. Tickets: 0171 928 2252 CHARLES SPENCER WITHDRAWN If an ad misleads, we're here to stamp it out. Advertising Standards Authority 2 Torrington Place London WCIE 7HW 0171 580 5555 http://www.asa.org.uk ASA in Aida at her most moving and magnificent IS less interested in public safety than in the sheer ghastliness of his moronic fellow humans.

There is wild talk of wholesale extermination and human experimentation with the gene pool. No wonder the impeccably liberal Miller bridied. This is a play that loathes the liberal consensus. Unfortunately the big confrontation isn't as electrifying here as it might be. The mob.

spilling out into the stalls, is too carefully choreographed and at any moment you fear that the defiant Stockmann is going to burst into song (My Way, perhaps). The drama has also lost resonance. The real cause for concern nowadays isn't health scares. but false health scares. At a time of perniciously nannyish EC regulations, it's hard not to feel a sneaking sympathy with the townspeople and some impatience our apocalyptic do-gooder of a hero.

I CONFESS to thinking Barstow that Opera Dame Josephine was crazy to attempt Aida at North this late stage in her career Grand Theatre. Leeds -it's much too taxing a role, pitted with exposed sensuousness and sensitivity: technical challenges, for a I just can't fault her. singer in her mid fifties who She meets her match, never had a big voice. Now however, in Sally Burgess' let me eat humble pie. What spoilt bitch of an Amneris, she does for Opera North an interpretation of viperish is nothing short of intensity which exploded magnificent.

after an unfocused start. Negotiating the musical Joan Crawford difficulties with a mixture couldn't have surpassed the of low cunning and high corrosive fury that Burgess artistry, Barstow acts with a brought to the Trial Scene, simple dignity that makes a and her encounter with Aida fundamentally two- was a masterly display of the dimensional character seem finer onenot only credible but upmanship. touching. She moves with Forget all the rubbish that girlish grace, she declaims bungs up opera today the text of Ritorna vincitor Barstow and Burgess are the with exemplary clarity, she Real McCoy. phrases some of Verdi's most Not that their colleagues eloquent melodic lines with let them down.

In almost every respect this was an enormously impressive performance of an opera not easily made theatrically plausible or musically cohesive. Philip Prowse's production, returning for the first time since 1986, is a real help here. Abandoning the pyramids and scarabs of Ancient Egypt, it opts instead for a mid 19thcentury setting some corrupt Middle-Eastern colony of the French Second Empire, I guess and imbues it with an atmosphere of fetid, overdressed corruption. The updating proves liberating: Prowse's sets and costumes are sumptuously beautiful, and his handling of the frigid plot admirably lucid. Further virtues of this major revival are the conductor Giuliano Carella, giving a bold and fresh account of the score, and Jonathan Summers as Amonasro and Clive Bayley as an ayatollah high priest.

If only Edmund Barham as Radames had been happier he perked up towards the end, but not before he had slowly murdered Celeste Aida. And why sing the opera in Italian without surtitles? The cognoscenti may sneer, but the majority of Opera North's audience would find them a real aid to understanding and enjoyment. Grand Theatre tickets: 0113 2459351. Production also touring, information: 0113 2439999 RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN 'The most divinely beautiful sound I've heard all The Royal Opera's temporary banishment from Covent Garden has got off to a wonderful start' Rupert Christiansen Daily Telegraph NEW PRODUCTION Giulio Cesare Handel The Royal Opera Directed by Lindsay Posner at the Barbican Theatre Conducted by Ivor Bolton Supported by The Friends of Covent Garden Trevor 23 25 29 September Photo I October at 6.30pm The Royal Opera Cast includes: Box Office 0171-304 4000 Ann Murray Amanda Roocroft Elena Kelessidi Barbican Centre David Daniels and Gerald Finley 0171 638 8891 (9am 8pm daily).