How has Matthew Bourne influenced the Ballet genre

Introduction

Louis XIV organized the teaching and presentation of music and dance by setting up academies. The Académie Royal de Musique (1669) was officially given the exclusive right to present operas, which led to a new genre, the opera-ballet, initiated by the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, which combined vocal scenes with danced interludes. Following the developments in Italian opera, composers made new demands on singers, who had to study for years in order to be able to meet them successfully. After the mid-17th century, singers exerted considerable influence on the structure of new works because they demanded showpiece arias at certain places in the text. The dramatic technique of Baroque opera followed set rules: arias were to be sung at the front of the stage, facing the audience; the chorus was directed as a static body; and the ornate setting was an elaborate decoration with which to please the eye rather than a functional definition of the acting area. One effect of the academies was to transfer dance activities from the court to the professional stage, and in 1681 the first professional dancers appeared in Le Triomphe de l’amour (The Triumph of Love), choreographed by Charles-Louis Beauchamp to Lully’s music.

Theatre in Great Britain and Ireland

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) was plunged into turmoil again when its artistic director, Adrian Noble, resigned on April 24, 2002. Noble’s announcement came the week after his West End production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a new musical based on the 1968 movie, opened to good reviews and a healthy advance at the box office at the London Palladium. Cynics saw Chitty’s flying car and future success bearing Noble conveniently away from a mess not necessarily all of his own making.

No one knew what would happen to Noble’s plan for the proposed demolition of the main Stratford theatre, the so-called “Shakespeare village” by the River Avon, or indeed where future London seasons would be presented—now that the company had torn up its contract with the Barbican Theatre, where it had enjoyed special rates and terms of employment for staff. In addition, Noble’s intention to operate as a player in the West End seemed fraught with danger, especially since most theatregoing taxpayers saw the government-funded RSC as an idealist alternative to the commercial imperatives of Shaftesbury Avenue, the heart of London’s theatre district.

How the RSC would recover from this debacle was not clear. Debts mounted with an economically disastrous season of late romances—The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles—at the Roundhouse in North London. In July, Michael Boyd, an RSC associate director, was named to succeed Noble when his contract expired in March 2003. Boyd promptly gave an unfortunate press interview in which he said that theatre was no longer all that important, that Shakespeare was “horny,” and that he hoped to employ Hollywood actors, such as Nicole Kidman.

Productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Antony and Cleopatra moved from Stratford to the Haymarket in the West End. Harriet Walter and Nicholas Le Prevost were delightful as a middle-aged Beatrice and Benedick drenched in vituperation and Sicilian sunshine, and Sinead Cusack was a skittish and sensual Cleopatra opposite Stuart Wilson’s grizzled Antony. Back in Stratford, the Swan had a critically approved season of Elizabethan and Jacobean rarities supervised brilliantly by Gregory Doran, another RSC associate director. The company was led by Sir Antony Sher, who tore a passion to tatters in both Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor and John Marston’s The Malcontent.

Change was in the air all over the British theatre. Sam Mendes announced that he would leave his post as artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse after 10 years and presented a highly successful season of new American plays: Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, David Auburn’s Proof (starring a luminous Gwyneth Paltrow), and the world premiere of Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg’s stunning drama of sexual confusions and rivalries at the baseball diamond. Mendes himself bowed out after directing (and bagging best director in the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for) Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with a handpicked company led by Simon Russell Beale, Emily Watson, Helen McCrory, and Mark Strong.

Michael Grandage was named Mendes’s successor and had as his first production a revival at year’s end of Noël Coward’s The Vortex,starring Francesca Annis and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Grandage would continue to be responsible for programming at the Sheffield Crucible in Yorkshire, where he enjoyed another outstanding year; he had enticed Kenneth Branagh back to the stage in an electrifying Richard III.

New directors were also named at the Almeida Theatre in London (Michael Attenborough), the Hampstead Theatre (Anthony Clark), theWest Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds (Ian Brown), and the Chichester Festival Theatre, where a panel of three—directors Steven Pimlottand Martin Duncan, with administrator Ruth Mackenzie—were charged with halting the theatre’s financial slide. Whether they could winback the aging Chichester audience was another matter. Outgoing director Andrew Welch had done sterling work with new directors, and his summer season boasted a fine revival of the Broadway classic The Front Page, with Michael Pennington as the irascible editorWalter Burns.

Pimlott directed one of the West End’s biggest hits, the new musical Bombay Dreams, a colourful satire of Bollywood movies with a vibrant score by A.R. Rahman (“the Asian Mozart”). Andrew Lloyd Webber was the producer, which was some consolation for him; the composer’s Starlight Express closed after 17 years, and his trailblazing blockbuster Cats drew in its claws on its 21st anniversary, May 11.

The other big musical hit was We Will Rock You, a show scripted by Ben Elton around the songs of the rock group Queen. As with Mamma Mia!, which featured the music of Abba, the audience for the music found its way to the theatre, although unlike Mamma Mia!, the show was harshly received by the critics. The mania for making musicals out of pop music’s back catalogs continued with Our House, which used the songs of the 1980s ska group Madness.

Boy George, a flamboyant pop star of 20 years earlier, re-created a vanished pop era in his likable new musical Taboo, which featured some excellent new songs that bolstered a couple of his more familiar hits. Taboo opened a new West End venue just off Leicester Square and featured an ever-changing roster of guest stars, rather like the long-running Art, which closed with popular television comedy trio League of Gentlemen occupying roles first taken by Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Ken Stott.

The hit Broadway musical version of the British movie The Full Monty was warmly welcomed but struggled to attract full houses. Madonna had no such problem when she appeared in Up for Grabs, by Australian playwright David Williamson, though her performance as an unscrupulous art dealer was notable only for the attention she generated offstage. The play was dire, too, and added more fuel to the debate about Hollywood stars performing on the London stage and the question of “can they really act?” The answer this year was—they certainly can—except for Madonna.

Three young Hollywood stars—Hayden Christensen, Anna Paquin, and Jake Gyllenhaal—were outstanding in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, and Matt Damon, Summer Phoenix, and Casey Affleck served as their able and charismatic replacements (though Damon was too old for the role of a spoiled brat and minor drug runner). Woody Harrelson and Kyle MacLachlan were positively mesmerizing in Canadian playwright John Kolvenbach’s On an Average Day, which was only an average play, with too many obvious echoes of Sam Shepard and David Mamet; two brothers meet up after a long period apart and unravel family problems.

Still, in comparison with these transatlantic imports, much of the West End seemed dull, even a revival of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, which starred Vanessa Redgrave paired with her own daughter, Joely Richardson, as an onstage mother and daughter. West End long-running hits of yesteryear, Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970s) and Denise Deegan’s Daisy Pulls It Off (1980s), were dusted down to contrasting, but not devastating, effect. Sleuth, with Peter Bowles adding to his gallery of smooth rogues, was given a chic, antiseptic setting and a patina of homoeroticism that would have surprised original audiences; Daisy, on the other hand, was just the same old jolly hockey sticks schoolgirl fun, with nothing much new to say to anyone.

Sir Alan Ayckbourn and Sir Tom Stoppard came through with ambitious trilogies—three new plays each in a year when most of the other brand-name dramatists were also represented. Ayckbourn’s Damsels in Distress—which originated in his Scarborough, Yorkshire, home theatre—arrived in the West End with the original cast of seven actors in three unrelated plays in an identical London Docklands apartment. This event marked a return to Ayckbourn’s top form, though none of the plays was as good as his Bedroom Farce, which was gorgeously revived with Richard Briers and June Whitfield giving a master class in understated comedy and timing. Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy followed the fortunes of a group of mid-19th-century Russian radicals and was sumptuously staged at the Royal National Theatre (RNT) by Sir Trevor Nunn. Most felt that the three three-hour long plays (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage) could have been trimmed or compressed, but Nunn had assembled a crack acting ensemble led by Stephen Dillane as the heroic, pragmatic Aleksandr Herzen, Douglas Henshall as the tempestuous Mikhail Bakunin, and rising star Eve Best as a woman worth changing the world for. Karl Marx was a walk-on funny turn.

Matthew Bourne

At the National, Nunn instigated a “Transformations” season in an attempt to attract younger audiences, but the artistic results were mixed. A series of mundane “pub theatre” plays were not all that impressive, but Matthew Bourne, choreographer of Nunn’s still-running My Fair Lady revival, came up with a gem, Play Without Words, in the reconfigured Lyttelton Theatre. The work was a virtually wordless dance drama based on British movies of the 1960s such as The Servant and Darling. Each character was played-danced in triplicate to the intricate, seductive jazz score—played live—by Terry Davies. It was the most unusual and original piece of the year.

A strong contender for the best play of the year also emerged at the National. Vincent in Brixton by Nicholas Wright used some recently established information about Vincent van Gogh’s residency in South London to create a compelling drama about awakening love andcreative impulses. Jochum Ten Haaf was the wonderful young Dutch actor playing van Gogh, and Clare Higgins gave one of the performances of the year as his widowed landlady, a woman whose recharged sexuality corresponded with van Gogh’s realization of his destiny. The play was directed with dedicated intensity by Sir Richard Eyre.

Other notable events at the RNT were Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, in which Anita Dobson gave a performance to rival Higgins’s as the mother of a murdered 10-year-old girl; Glenn Close as Blanche Du Bois in Nunn’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire; and Sir Ian Holm and Ralph Fiennes appearing, respectively, in new plays by Shelagh Stephenson (Mappa Mundi) and Christopher Hampton (The Talking Cure).

In Sir David Hare’s A Breath of Life, old friends Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench appeared together onstage for the first time since they shared a dressing room in 1960 at the Old Vic. At the Young Vic, David Lan directed two superb productions: Jude Law in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Ann-Marie Duff, Marjorie Yates, and Paul Hilton in D.H. Lawrence’s 1912 masterpiece The Daughter-in-Law. The best new plays at the Royal Court were The York Realist by Peter Gill and A Number by Caryl Churchill, with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig playing out a dense duet about cloning.

In Dublin, Brian Friel created an afterlife in Afterplay for two Chekhov characters— Sonya from Uncle Vanya and Andrey from Three Sisters. The two meet in a Moscow cafe in the 1920s, and their catch-up, cross play, and burgeoning companionship—there is never any real companionship in Chekhov—was a joy to behold in the perfect performances of Penelope Wilton and John Hurt at the Gate Theatre. Also at the Gate was Frank McGuinness’s Gates of Gold, a speculative and beautiful coda for the real-life founders of the Gate, Michael McLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. Again, this was an occasion for a brace of unforgettable performances, this time by Alan Howard and Richard Johnson.

The 45th Dublin Theatre Festival offered a notable program of new plays, including Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of a French farce, Le Dîner de cons (also a successful film), and Marina Carr’s Ariel. The latter was an exploration of power and corruption in contemporary Irish society and a poetic companion piece to Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland, one of the most underrated plays of the year, in which Patrick Malahide gave a momentous performance as a character not totally dissimilar to Charles Haughey, the disgraced Irish politician.

Conclusion

If there was a lack of great theatre in France before Corneille, it was well compensated for by extravagant court ceremonials in which dance featured prominently. These reached a high level of sophistication in the later 16th century, stimulated by the presence of Italian dancing masters invited to the French court by Catherine de Médicis. A product of this collaboration was the ballet comique, a courtly dance entertainment with words. Another Italian import was changeable-perspective scenery, which was brought to Paris in 1645 by the designer Giacomo Torelli, who completely refurbished the Petit-Bourbon. The staging of court ballets was accordingly adapted to show off the possibilities of the new machinery. Louis XIV often took part in these and earned the title Le Roi Soleil (The Sun King) when he performed as the Sun in Le Ballet de la nuit in 1653. Molière was called upon to provide texts for elaborate court festivities at Versailles involving ballets, plays, fireworks displays, and theatrical banquets.

References

• Fisk, Josiah, ed. Composers on Music: Eight Centuries of Writings. 2nd ed. Northeastern, 1997. Composers from the 14th century to the present write about music, society.
• Grout, Donald J. A History of Western Music. 6th ed. Norton, 2000. History of musical styles related to culture; glossary, bibliography.
• Kendall, Alan. The Chronicle of Classical Music: An Intimate Diary of the Lives and Music of the Great Composers. 2nd ed. Thames & Hudson, 2000. Yearly summaries from 1600 to 1994; glossary, biographies, bibliography.
• Lang, Paul Henry. Music in Western Civilization. Norton, 1997. Hailed as a must-read classic since its first publication in 1941.
• Morgan, Robert P. Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe. Norton, 1991. National and philosophical movements and trends and the music of a turbulent century.
• Palisca, Claude V., ed. Norton Anthology of Western Music. 2 vols. 3rd ed. Norton, 1996. Presentation of 158 pieces of music to accompany Grout’s History of Western Music; tables, translations.
• Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. 2 vols. 4th ed., Norton, 2001. Traces the musical styles used by three composers.
• Smith, Stuart Saunders, and Thomas DeLio, eds. Words and Spaces: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Musical Experiments in Language and Sonic Environments. University Press of America, 1989, 2002. The avant-garde scene in American music.