Manon (English National Ballet)

"Manon" is a ballet I love, but it's far from a guarantee of a good evening. In the hands of a great company (the Royal Ballet mostly) it can be beautiful. Manhandled by a bad one (Vienna State fumbled this one) and it's a fairly slow evening. The performance I saw from the English National Ballet was neither really. Very well danced in places, downright superb in a couple of cases, but not entirely satisfactory emotionally. They've borrowed the production from another company, and it's a disappointingly grey, murky staging (literally).

The sets are practical, tourable ones but on the vast coliseum stage they end up looking a bit bare. On the whole this doesn't take too much away from the show although some atmosphere is lost but the final scene in the swamps suffers massively. The ghostly apparitions aren't so ghostly without the elaborate drapes. Most of the costumes are a grey affair with the odd hint of colour which works fine but the Harlots of Act II are dressed in a truly hidious colour palette (totally incongruous to the rest of the production). Imagine marshmallows selling sex and that's pretty much what is on stage here. The creative lighting makes up for a good deal of the relatively low production values elsewhere but with the exception of the start of Act III, which nails the seedy, imposing New World (Pretty front cloth as well which oozes squalor), this is very much a poor man's "Manon" relative to the production down the road.

What matters ultimately though is the dancing and this was much better than I expected (especially considering the dreary performance of theirs I caught in Oxford not long ago). Begoña Cao debuting in the title role made a real effort to capture MacMillan's style but missed a good deal of the emotion. The conflicting emotions of Manon were largely missing. Her desperation to survive pushes her from the man she loves but Cao's shift seemed to come purely from her love of a fancy coat and it made a mockery of the captivatingly delivered bedroom pas de deux that had just passed. What she did manage was to simply exude sex appeal which works at least on a surface level. Her Des Grieux was Esteban Berlanga, a young dancer, who on the basis of this showing has a big future. His partnering was a little scrappy in places and overall he was a little princely for the role but he nailed the very taxing opening solo and barely put a foot wrong throughout. As a partnership they had some absolutely lovely moments, the final scene triumphing despite the problems earlier on in the piece. Zhanat Atymtayev was a late replacement as Lescaut and he started very strongly displaying an extremely solid technique and the sort of edgy excitement that drew my eye to him. He entirely failed at the humorous drunk solo of Act II, appearing far too much like a strong dancer deliberately falling over, but shifted right back to strength as things turn nasty. Overall top honours must go to Jenna Lee's saucy Mistress, precisely working her way through her steps whilst demonstrating a real grip on the character. Whilst most of the pure dance was very strong the character acting was either massively overblown or meekly done in the background. Antony Dowson makes for an almost nonexistent GM. He should be a nasty piece of work, the central villain of the piece, but it wasn't till he shot a major character that I really took note of him. Fabian Reimair offered quite the opposite as the Gaoler, a one note, extreme creep. Some blame must be laid on the restricting costume and thick make-up which leave little room for expression, but it was still a one dimensional performance.

Things didn't quite come together but nor did they fall apart. I don't think I've ever seen the English National Ballet corps dance so strongly, I'd go as far as to say sections were danced far more accurately than the Royal managed in their last revival. The orchestra were sounding in good form under Timothy Carey, it isn't the finest score but it works. None of the leads was entirely on top of their characters but nor did anyone fail to fit within the spirit of the piece. Tidy dancing but little emotion. A middling "Manon".