” If it’s spectacle you seek, then Birmingham Royal Ballet most certainly have the Swan Lake for you.” However, maybe more isn’t always more…
📍 Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 Thur 30 Mar to Sat 1 Apr 2023
🕖 Evenings, 7.30pm | Matinee, Sat 2.30pm
🕖 Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes (including 2 intervals)
🎬 Production: Peter Wright & Galina Samsova
🩰Choreography: Lev Ivanov, Marius Petipa and Peter Wright
⚒️ Designs: Philip Prowse
🎼 Composer & Sound Designer: Alexandra Faye Braithwaite
💡 Lighting: Peter Teigen (adapted by Johnny Westall-Eyre)
🎼 Music: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
🎂 8+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Audio Induction Loop
First staged in 1981, Peter Wright and Galina Samsova’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has been repeatedly revived ever since. That alone strongly suggests a template of surpassing and enduring quality, and a high bar for subsequent cohorts of the Birmingham Royal Ballet to aspire to.
This current incarnation remains, without question, an exceptionally lavish undertaking, Philip Prowse’s design lush as a Disney-animated fairytale seen through a glass darkly. It’s a canvas against which vibrantly attired heroes, villains, courtiers, and swans can’t fail to shine. The principals, attired most lightly, give uniformly excellent performances, led by a celestial Céline Gittens as tragic Princess Odette, and her evil fascimile Odile.
Now, the best physical theatre never loses sight of its story, and ballet is no exception. In this respect, the narrative – to the uninitiated – is clear in the most part, with the exception of the final scene. Off-staging the fates of Prince Siegfriend (Brandon Lawrence), and Odette leaves just too much scope for confusion. Up that point however, the tale of the lonely Prince and cursed Swan Princess blighted by owlish sorcerer Rothbart (Rory Mackay) is plain enough.
Further, few ballets evince a comparable capacity to elicit ooh’s and aah’s from the audience, from Riku Ito’s soaring leaps, to a conjuration of swan maidens from a dense sea of dry-ice. There’s also the lightest trace of comedy to distract from impending gloom, as rival princesses give each other the side-eye, to Odette evading Siegfriend’s advances with an attitude worthy of The Trocks. Indeed, and this might only be a product of the angle from my seat, I all but corpsed when she presented him with a single upward digit.
In the pit, the Royal Ballet Sinfonia under Thomas Jung do absolute justice to the iconic score, a full-bodied, yet delicate soundscape rich in delicious melody, and roaring gravitas.
It must be said that on the evening of the 30th, the corps de ballet were not always at their sharpest, and if Rosanna Ely, Reina Fuchigami, Sofia Liñares, & Rachele Pizzillo excel in the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’, other passages are want to imprecise blocking, and asynchronous action. The innaccuracies measure in the millisecond, and whilst absolute perfection is impossible, the errors mount up. This can maybe be accorded, in part, to the extravagant costumery many of the corps sport throughout. Indeed some of the heavier tabards noticeably collide with neighbouring dancers, and in an undertaking as precise as ballet dancing, is an avoidable source of imbalance.
En masse and resplendant, this huge cast (too many for all to take a curtain call), certainly create an epic montage. The logistics alone of transporting this gargantuan undertaking are not a little boggling. Through it all, Gittens glides with superlative grace, her every action a study in considered perfection. Lawrence, tall and elegant certainly gives a heartfelt performance, a sympathetic and archly-competent foil to his partner’s excellence.
You will never see a Swan Lake grander than this, one which so clearly ascribes to the ‘more is more’ philosophy of theatre making. If it’s spectacle you seek, then Birmingham Royal Ballet most certainly have the Swan Lake for you.
Swan Lake plays the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh from 30 March to 1st April 2023. It is a Birmingham Royal Ballet production sponsored by Charles Stanley Wealth Managers.
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