I’m back in the country and back in the theatre this weekend, and this time it’s the new Matthew Bourne show, which was in my town this week. This is great to start with, because my local theatre didn’t use to be on the touring list for him, but now it is which is a good sign. The theatre was very full on Tuesday night and stayed pretty full for the q&a with Matthew Bourne himself afterwards.
So The Midnight Bell is a series of interconnected stories, all playing out at basically the same time in and around a pub in Soho in the 1930s. It’s inspired by the novels of Patrick Hamilton, which I will admit I haven’t read but during the Q&A (and in the programme) Matthew Bourne explained that he has mixed characters from different novels together, added his own and made it all a bit less bleak than the novels are. And it’s definitely darker than some of Bourne’s other works that I’ve seen (currently standing at six of his New Adventures shows plus the latest production of Oliver! which he choreographed) and perhaps less hopeful. But it is brilliantly atmospheric – dark and seedy with beautiful dancing and acting.
I think this is the best cast of dancers that I have seen for a New Adventures show – it’s got lots of their longtime company members all doing brilliant work. There are two people for each role, so there are lots of variations on who you could see, but almost all the names were familiar to me and I was excited to see Dominic North again, as well as Liam Mower. As I said at the top, the theatre was very full on Tuesday night, although I was disappointed to hear some people grousing at the interval about the fact that there was a gay storyline and a couple of couples left. But they missed out because the second half – set a month after the first act – has even more beautiful dancing and clever and interesting resolutions to the various storylines. I liked the device of having characters miming to old songs as well – it added to what you understand of the characters and their motivations and is something different that I haven’t seen Bourne do before – in the Q&A he said he liked it because it is “on the edge of not working, which makes it exciting” and I would agree with that.
This is on tour through until the autumn – check out the New Adventures website for dates and locations, and most of them also have a Q&A night too.
It’s probably stating the obvious, but it’s a long way from the UK to Kuala Lumpur, so on the way there and back I had plenty of opportunity to sample the inflight entertainment and although I did take full advantage of the fact that they had a number of my old favourite movies that I used to lull me to sleep (namely Sean Connery James Bond movies but also my beloved Pillow Talk and The Philadelphia Story), I do still have a recommendation to give you today from my viewing.
Swan Song is a feature length documentary (although if you are in Canada there was an extended four part series version) about the National Ballet of Canada’s staging of a new production of Swan Lake, under the directorship of their outgoing artistic director, retired ballerina Karen Kain. Originally due to premiere in 2020, the production was delayed by Covid, so it also shows an artform trying to regroup after the lockdowns and closures that threatened the survival of so many arts organisations. As well as Karen Kain, the documentary follows the company’s principal ballerina Jurgita Dronina and several members of the corps de ballet.
A lot of the issues that commonly come up when you’re talking about ballet are in this too – including the reckoning with racism and the fact that all the ballet “ideals” are built around white dancers, and the ever present spectre of eating disorders and body image issues. But it’s also got lots of beautiful dancing as well as a close up view of the effort it takes to mount a production like this, as well as how hard it is to be a member of the corps – which is something that often gets overlooked.
Regular readers will know that although I’m about as graceful as, well, something very ungraceful* I absolutely adored ballet books when I was a child – and in fact have all the Sadlers Wells and Drina books on my shelves to this day** and I really like documentaries that take you behind the scenes of ballet. The BBC has had a couple of really good ones – including Men at the Barre (sadly currently unavailable to watch on iPlayer) where we discovered that Vadim Muntagirov is known as Vadream by the ballerinas because he’s such a dream to work with – and so this was total catnip for me.
Although I’ve seen Swan Lake a few times and watched a whole load of documentaries about it, I wasn’t massively familiar with the National Ballet of Canada, so there was lots of interesting new stuff for me here. I wouldn’t count myself as a massive ballet fan though – so I don’t know how this would land for someone who is, but I think it would be interesting to the casual theatre or dance fan too. Him Indoors is usually my gauge of things like this for the non-fan – and I think there’s some stuff that he would have been interested in, but most of the backstage-y stuff isn’t for him, so it’s probably one that I would put on when he was out of the room and see what happened when he came back in, rather than one that I would put on to watch with him!
If you’re not going on a plane in the near future and want to watch this, it’s available to purchase now on the various streaming platforms. And just before I go it would be remiss of me to have a post about ballet this weekend and not mention the sudden death of Michaela Mabinty DePrince at just 29. Her journey from war-torn Sierra Leone to the highest level of ballet was remarkable, and she was a dedicated humanitarian as well as a beautify dancer. I’m still in a bit of shock about it to be honest.
See you tomorrow.
*I suggested Peter Crouch, but Him Indoors insists that Crouch is infact graceful. I was aiming for something that has too many legs and flails a lot. Answers on a postcard/in the comments
Let’s continue the overarching themes of this month again – with some ballet and some theatre in a classic film.
The Red Shoes is all about a ballerina’s dedication to her art being tested by an impresario forcing her to chose between her career and love. Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page is plucked from obscurity to be the lead role in a new ballet, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story of the Red Shoes. But at the same time she’s secretly falling in love with a composer who is working with the country. And so it begins. I’m not spoiling the rest of it.
Made in 1948, it’s frequently on lists of the best British films ever – it got a bunch of Oscar nominations at the time and its reputation has only increased since then. It’s one of the sequence of Powell and Pressburger films from that period – coming after the adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Black Narcissus which is one of the other really well known ones. It’s also packed full of real ballet dancers – so you can see Robert Helpmann in a role that’s not the Child Catcher!
For me, when I first saw it the opening ballet class and performance sequences showed me exactly what I had imagined Veronica’s life at the Wells to be like. The film is from just a couple of years before the first Sadlers Wells book was published – I think Moira Shearer even gets a mention in one of them – although obviously Veronica is a child and Vicky is already a trained dancer, and Veronica and Sebastian’s… situation has a positive resolution!
A couple of years back, Matthew Bourne turned the film into a ballet, using the amazing score. I saw it on it it’s first tour and it’s proper good. New Adventures rotate through their shows, and it was touring when Covid started and everything stopped, so it might be a while before it’s on stage again – but it’s worth seeing when it is. But in the meantime, you can just go an watch the original film, which was restored in 2009 and looks amazing. It’s on BritBox if you have that, or you can buy it on DVD. It also comes around on TV reasonably regularly – often around Christmas.
Happy Sunday everyone – if it’s a bank holiday where you are, I hope you’re enjoying it.
It took 20 years – but I finally have a matching set
I know exactly when I got my first Drina book – because when my mum gives people books, she always writes a message in them. She gave me Ballet for Drina in June 1991 – when I was seven – to read while she was in hospital for an operation. In the front she wrote that it was one of her favourite books when she was little – and I loved it as well from the moment I first read it and wanted the rest of the books in the series. Several of the others in the series have inscriptions in them marking them as being holiday books from various trips around the south coast. I’ve had the whole set since I was about 14 – but a couple of them didn’t match (smaller size! Different cover style!) and thanks to the wonders of eBay I got the “missing” matching books last year and was finally able to put them in order without the fretting over the fact that they didn’t look right! As you can see they’re all very well-loved – except Drina, Ballerina, one of the new additions, but I can assure you that my old copy is practically falling apart further down the shelf.
The Drina books are responsible for my childhood dream of being a ballerina – a dream which lead eight-year-old me to try to sew my own pointe shoes from an old cotton shirt from the ragbag, some loo roll and some hair ribbons! Drina is also responsible for some notable mispronunciations in my vocabulary – from the say-it-how-you-see-it school of reading – to this day I still struggle to pronounce Igor as Eegor rather than Eye-gor. Particularly because my stepgran had a beautiful Persian Blue called eegor that I used to feed when I went to visit and I always associate names with the first person/animal I knew with that name…
For those of you who haven’t read the series, it’s the story of Andrina Adamo – known as Drina – an orphan who is being brought up by her grandparents and who finds out when she starts ballet lessons in the first book that her mother was actually famous ballerina, who was killed in a plane crash along with her husband on a flight to New York where she was due to dance. Drina is desperate to be a ballet dancer – but wants to succeed on her own without any help (or hindrance) from her famous mother’s name. At the start of the second book the family move to London for her grandfather’s job and Drina starts at ballet school. The rest of the series follows Drina’s trials and tribulations in her quest to succeed – including overcoming her grandmother’s reluctance to let her follow in her mother’s footsteps, twisted ankles, school rivalries, her grandfather’s health problems which lead to her having to spend time away from her training and falling in love (at 14) with a glamourous New Yorker a couple of years older than her called Grant.
It’s hard to pick favourites – but I think mine are Drina Dances Again – where she plays Little Clara in The Nutcracker and Mr Dominick and Madame Volonaise find out Drina’s closely guarded secret about her mother’s identity; Drina Dances in Paris – where Drina goes to dance in The Nutcracker in Paris and Grant (the New Yorker) comes to visit her, Drina Dances on Tour – where her big secret finally comes out, she joins the company, experiences what it’s like to be in the corps de ballet and where Grant arrives in London and comes to find her and Drina, Ballerina which sees the series end with her dancing her mother’s most famous role and marrying Grant.
Looking back at what I’ve written, it sounds like a very far-fetched tale, but then how many children’s stories aren’t! I read them over and over when I was younger, and even as a teenager when I was poorly I’d get out my Drina books and start reading them all over again. Even today, just flicking through them so that I could write this post I’ve come over with the urge to sit down with them and have another read.
Looking at Amazon, I don’t think they’re in print anymore – which is a real shame – because there are still as many ballet mad little girls out there as there always were.
But that does lead me to another thought that has crossed my mind more than once – I am part of the last generation who will read these sort of stories and be able to see my own life in them? For all that Ballet for Drina was written in 1957, it was very similar to my own life – a world with no mobile phones or home computers and where most houses only had one TV – although flying wasn’t the big deal that it was in Drina and liners had stopped being a method of getting to New York by the early 90s. The same applies to a lot of the school stories I used to read (many of which I’m sure I’ll post about in due course) – the only difference between my life and theirs was that their trains ran on coal and that they called maths arithmetic. Will today’s children – who’ve grown up with smart phones, iPads, laptops, the internet and Playstations be able to buy into these stories the same way? I hope so, because I know how much enjoyment and knowledge I got from them when I was little.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 