MUCH ADO ABUT NOTHING at the Lyttelton, National Threatre - thin and crispy

Odd that in forty years of theatregoing at the National Theatre I have just seen only my fourth Shakespearean production at the Lyttelton - directors prefer the sweep of the Olivier or the intimate Cottesloe-as-was, Dorfman-as-is; the Lyttelton seems too 'contained' for the Bard.  Simon Russell Beale in HAMLET, Bill Bryden's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and Ian McKellen as RICHARD III can now be joined by Simon Godwin's lightweight MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Imagine a Mitchell Leisen-directed MUCH ADO Hollywood screwball comedy starring Frederic March and Carole Lombard as warring lovers Benedick and Beatrice then imagine a National Theatre stage adaptation of it... then imagine it transferring to the West End... then imagine seeing the second replacement cast.  That's the impression I was left with.

The last MUCH ADO I saw was the bizarre Old Vic production woefully directed by Mark Rylance and starring Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones - relive the horror here - so I enjoyed the Babycham fizz of this production - just not enough...  All it did was remind me of the wonderful Branagh / Thompson film and the 2008 delicious pairing of Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker at the Olivier - relive that here.

The setting is now Leonato's sprauncy Hotel Messina on the Riviera in the 1930s; in the rewrite, Leonato has lost a brother but gained a wife Antonia.  He still welcomes Don Pedro's batallion of soldiers which includes young Claudio who loves Leonato's daughter Hero, the militantly single Benedick and Don Pedro's illegitimate brother Don John, who is quietly seeking revenge on Claudio for gaining promotion instead of him.

Staying at the hotel already is Beatrice, Hero's cousin, who suffers no fools and had previously had a relationship with Benedick but now "There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them."  As the "merry war" resumes, the nasty Don John schemes to undo Claudio's love for Hero.

Something very odd happens midway through MUCH ADO: after Claudio is tricked into thinking Hero has been unfaithful to him and rebuffs her at the altar, a plot is developed to make him think Hero died through his actions and he has to publicly grieve for her before marrying a relative of hers.  Now we know it's a trick, the characters know it's a trick but every production I have seen suddenly switches from comedy to tragedy for this section of the play, with only the interminable "rude mechanicals" sub-plot of Dogberry and his night watchmen discovering the plot.  

Of course it is all eventually laughed off as - indeed - much ado about nothing but the questions always remain: if Claudio has already proved too quick to believe his intended is unfaithful why won't he do so again and if all it took to reunite Beatrice and Benedick was hearsay from others, how solid is their relationship?  Luckily no one has ever dared write a sequel so we will take Mr Shakespeare's word that they did, indeed, live happily ever after.

I just wish Simon Godwin has paused the relentlessly jolly production to have reflected the darker undertows of the capers but the National obviously wants a summer Shakespeare so a summer Shakespeare it shall have with a jazz band and choreographed company dancing to boot.

Anna Fleischele's palatial hotel set is impressive but ultimately all it does is sit there in the way while the costume design is colourful but also distracting: Beatrice's costumes also are very unbecoming on Katherine Parkinson's shortish stature.

John Heffernan is a charming Benedick but again doesn't really remain memorable while Katherine Parkinson again is a serviceable Beatrice but in a very studied ironical way...  it's a rare actress who makes no impression with Beatrice's glorious line "but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born."  As I said above, they felt like a replacement cast.

Of the supporting performers I liked the Antonia of Wendy Kweh whose anger at the supposed shaming of her daughter really woke up that scene, there was an intelligent Hero from Ionna Kimbrook and Rufus Wright's Leonato was impressibly quick to anger in the denunciation scene but that's about it.  Don't get me started on Claudio performing his lines like a footballer being inverviewed after a game or Margaret (the actress is making her first professional appearance after drama school) saying her lines like she was shouting them from the main stage at Glastonbury.

But Shakespeare was the star of the show, as is so often the case, with his 423 year-old words still making one laugh and sigh... and was there ever a better summation of a comedy than the lovely "...for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion".

xt Signior Benedick and
her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.

This
a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and
her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.

THE CORN IS GREEN at Lyttelton, National Theatre - The Play's Not The Thing....

An imagined conversation:

Mr Norris: Great news!  We have TV Land's own Nicola Walker coming back to the National.

Mr Cooke: Coolio!  What to do?

Mr Norris: So... it's got to be a Strong Independant Woman, out there on her own, facing down prejudice and division.  So maybe something which is "heritage"?  THE CORN IS GREEN has been mooted...

Mr Cooke: But that's a warhorse fit only for Chichester all-star revivals... it's hardly National Theatre is it?  Maybe once upon a time but not now...

Mr Norris: I know... so let's do the two Rs... Radical Reimagining!

Mr Cooke: Leave it to me boss!

THE CORN IS GREEN... but not as we know it.  For 84 years. Emlyn Williams' semi-autobiographical play of a dedicated teacher in a Welsh coal-mining village focussing on a young lad with a gift for writing to get him a scholarship to Oxford, has been delivering it's remit as a Well-Written Play with a beginning a middle and an end and a stonking female lead role.  But no.  That is not enough for the National Theatre... it has to be Radically Reinterpreted to make it Relevant.

The trouble is that all Dominic Cooke's meta trappings do is make a long play longer and appear tacky, lazy and shallow framing such a well-constructed piece, standing in the audience's way shouting LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME for no good reason at all.

Cooke has taken a look at the play, snapped his fingers and said "Of course, it's a memory play" so has staged it as one - no matter that it detracts from the material.  So Emlyn Williams is now an onstage character, first seen walking out of a 1920s dance party to struggle through composing his play.  Although by the time he wrote THE CORN IS GREEN, Williams was already a successful playwright and had just had a huge success with his thriller NIGHT MUST FALL.

So we sit through an interminable set-up with Williams being serenaded by a Welsh pit choir as he envisions on an empty set his setting, the makeshift classroom for the soon-to-arrive Miss Moffat.  Oh yes the set... a totally empty stage until the interval, after which the curtain rises on a rudimentary stage set which by the final scene is fully 'realistic' and has it's own cutsey proscenium border.  Again this does absolutely nothing for the audience's understanding of the play, having run the first half's gamut of radio-style special effects to signify doors opening and closing, footsteps going upstairs etc.

Oh yes the singing... Dominic Cooke has scattered throughout the action, passages of singing from a group of Welsh miners - if he was so desperate to make his production a musical one wonders why he didnt just have a go at the 1970s US flop musical MISS MOFFAT in which Bette Davis attempted to revisit the role she had filmed in 1945, rewritten for the deep south instead of Wales, thankfully it died on the road.

The Emlyn Williams character reads out stage directions and the set design, occasionally changing lines as the characters say them and seemingly re-inventing the last act as it's being acted out.  As I said it all smacks of a director who doesnt trust his material - THE CORN IS GREEN is several things but what it isn't is THE GLASS MENAGERIE or OUR TOWN.

The emphasis on the Emlyn Williams / Morgan Evans character also tends to shift the focus from Nicola Walker as the centre of attention which should never be the case, it's her star role to play.  Miss Moffat was originally played by Sybil Thorndike in London and Ethel Barrymore on Broadway, Bette Davis made the afore-mentioned film while Katharine Hepburn made a TV movie in Wales in 1979 directed by George Cukor.  I had seen it before at the Old Vic in 1985 with a matronly Deborah Kerr as Miss Moffat and an Olivier-winning performance from Imelda Staunton as the teenage troublemaker Bessy Watty.

Nicola Walker certainly has a presence onstage, her Miss Moffat was determined and driven but it made the character hard to actually admire as she really showed no light or shade, hardly any emotion at all.  Iwan Davies had moments of fire but otherwise his Morgan Evans was hardly a match for Miss Moffat.  By far the best performance was from Saffron Coomber as Bessy, she actually made the best counter-point to Miss Moffat - as determined to better herself as the teacher wants for her pupil, but with inate knowledge of how to get what she wants now. not later.  Jo McInnes was fine as her cockney mother, former petty thief now a Salvation Army officer - a bit of a stretch there Emlyn - but the remaining cast hid behind their stock characters - spinster teacher, nice-but-dim squire, straight-laced teacher - without bringing them to life at all.

Again at the end of the play Cooke robs his leading lady of the final moment of quiet triumph; he has his production end with his Emlyn Williams character do a foxtrot to a 1930s tune with his fictional younger self.  What on earth was he thinking??

I won't be going back before it's last performance on 11th June.

BALLET BLACK at Stratford East / HANSARD at Lyttelton - Bite-size Theatre

Constant Reader, you will know that I have an ongoing bloggy-thing where I will review my dvds in exactly 150 words - my last one was Vivien Leigh's 1948 ANNA KARENINA - so I figured as the last two theatrical entertainments back-to-back would last about the length of a proper show I would do the same thing to blog about them:

First off the rank: BALLET BLACK at Stratford East

I passed on seeing Ballet Black this year as they performed the same day as Madonna's MADAME X was released... and you know, priorities.  So, as Owen liked them, we went to see them at Stratford East.  We usually see musicals there so it was good to see a dance production although we both felt the works were compromised by the stage's width.

The first piece was called PENDULUM, created in 2009, which was aptly titled as the choreography see-sawed between Sayaka Ichikawa and Mthuthuzeli November but I preferred the zoot-suited snap and sass of Sophie Laplane's ensemble piece CLICK which showcased the remarkable Isabela Coracy, resplendent in yellow.

INGOMA, choreographed by Mthuthuzeli November and based on a South Africa miner's strike in 1946, impressed with it's sombre intensity and it was well-danced by José Alves and Ichikawa, but I came away quietly impressed rather than intensely moved.

 

The next sliver of theatre was HANSARD at the Lyttelton Theatre, a debut play from actor-turned-playwright Simon Woods.

1988: Tory MP Robin Hesketh returns to his Cotswolds home for his birthday but finds his wife Diana in a combative mood: she reveals she knows that he has spent time out of the office allegedly with her and she wants answers.

30 years of marriage evaporate as Diana rips Robin's conservative government's values to shreds while delighting in ridiculing Thatcher; Robin responds with jibes about her excessive drinking and her slovenliness.

But The Thing They Don't Talk About is finally revealed through Diana's hatred of the newly-introduced Clause 28... can you guess what it is?  Woods' play - while full of cutting putdowns - was like watching a mash-up of David Hare and Edward Albee - WHO'S AFRAID OF MARGARET THATCHER anyone?  The middle-class audience laughed at all the jokes about Etonions and scruffy Labour leaders.

Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan are excellent but deserve a less obvious play.

RUTHERFORD AND SON at the Lyttelton, NT - Emotions Under Glass

In 1912 a play opened at the Royal Court which received such praise that it transferred to the Vaudeville Theatre where it ran for a respectable 133 performances.  RUTHERFORD AND SON, a family drama set against a Northern factory background, chimed with the recent social dramas of Granville Barker, Galsworthy and Shaw; in the same year, the play even appeared in New York.

KG Sowerby's debut play should have launched the writer to success but soon after the play's opening it was revealed that the playwright was a woman, Githa Sowerby.  Newspapers curiously interviewed this odd phenomenon of a female playwright and reported how such a demure lady could write such a hard-hitting work - in truth she was 35 and had a lifetime of experience to help her write her semi-autobiographical play.

Githa's family owned a glass works on the Tyne in Gateshead and she drew directly from that world for the background to her family drama.  She continued to write children's literature and a further six plays but none had the success of RUTHERFORD AND SON, most appearing in small theatre club presentations.  By the time of her death in 1970, her plays had fallen into obscurity.  In 1980 RUTHERFORD AND SON was revived, and it saw a later production at the National Theatre in 1994 with Bob Peck as the tyrannical John Rutherford; in 1998 the play was judged one of the 100 Plays Of The Twentieth Century in a National Theatre poll.

Any thoughts that this might be tokenism are forgotten when you see RUTHERFORD AND SON: it's a gripping play that has hardly aged at all and indeed must have been a seismic shock in 1912 with it's powerful feminist arguments for the 'angel in the house' who could not think for herself.

John Rutherford owns a glass-making factory in Gateshead and rules both factory and home with a will of iron, secretly hated by both employees and family.  His oldest son John Jnr had been sent to Harrow to be educated, but earned his father's displeasure by staying in London and marrying Mary, a working-class girl.  With his health failing, John has returned home with Mary and their baby son Tony, both of them ignored by Rutherford.

His daughter Janet has retreated into a sullen, bitter existence after a lifetime of emotional coldness from her father and the youngest, mild-mannered Richard has earned his father's disdain for becoming a local curate.  With his children failing him, Rutherford has favoured his young assistant Martin, who grew up with his sons.  He approves of Martin's move to a nearby lonely cottage but we later discover he only moved there so he and Janet can continue a clandestine relationship.

Trouble finally erupts when John reveals that, while in London, he discovered a formula for making glass cheaper - Rutherford expects him to give it to him as he is his father but John demands he is paid a good price.  John shocks his father telling him he has shared his formula with Martin who thinks it's a great idea.  Richard brings a woman to the house whose son has been sacked by Rutherford for stealing; when he refuses to take him back, she retaliates by telling him what the workers really think of him, she tells Richard he is thought of as an idiot and tells Rutherford his daughter Janet is the main subject for gossip for 'carrying on' with Martin.  Unseen by anyone, a humiliated Richard leaves the house forever.

Rutherford confronts Janet but she denounces him for cutting off any possible joy that might have been hers.  Rutherford demands she leave his house the next day but Janet is triumphant in knowing that she will be united with Martin.  But the next morning a dazed Martin tells her that Rutherford persuaded him to reveal the secret formula - and then promptly sacked him for colluding with his son and for making his family a laughing stock by 'ruining' her.  Janet realizes that her dreams are in tatters now he has capitulated to her father, and leaves the house to face life alone. 

John rages when Martin tells him what he did and is determined to succeed to spite his father.  He breaks into Rutherford's cash box and steals the money, despite Mary's pleading that if he is going to succeed it should be not using his father's methods but he refuses.  When John says he will go abroad to achieve success Mary realizes that she and her son will never feature in these plans and suggests he let her know when he is settled, an idea to which he all too quickly agrees. Rutherford returns to his house, triumphant but alone - but is he?  An unexpected offer comes from the most unexpected place...  who will blink first to secure the continuation of RUTHERFORD AND SON?

Sowerby's play remains remarkably relevant with it's take on patriarchy at home and in the workplace and women's rights but above all is a rattling good yarn and a well-written play which has languished in the shadows for too long.  Polly Findlay keeps the pressure-cooker atmosphere on all the way through it, even in the quieter moments you just know a ticking bomb is waiting to go off.  Her production starts with sheets of rain pouring from the heavens and ends the same way, compounding the claustrophobic feel of the play.

She is blessed with an ensemble who all give committed, unsentimental performances: Roger Allam is on sensational form as Rutherford, glowering and immovable in his disdain for the world, and in particular, his family. Interestingly, he does not dominate the other actors; it is genuinely an ensemble performance leaving his own stamp on his role.  He is ably matched by Justine Mitchell as Janet, who found colours within the role so while she initially drains one's sympathy in the character, once her plight is revealed she shows the tragedy of a life allowed to atrophy.  Her scene with Allam where father and daughter declare their hatred for each other was spellbinding.

The other male roles are all played with just the right central note of weakness: Joe Armstrong as Martin really gives the role an initial sturdiness that completely deserts him when he loses his job, he is genuinely adrift in his shocked sadness, unable to acknowledge Janet's desperate need for help.  Sam Troughton exudes a clammy, fidgety quality as the oldest son who feels he can challenge his father with his secret formula, only to be outdone again and in defeat, shows he is as devious as Rutherford.  In the smallest role, Harry Hepple is touching as the Curate who finds himself a disappointment to family and community.

Anjana Vasan, so good in SUMMER AND SMOKE at the Almeida, here shines in the difficult role of Mary, a young girl thrown into an alien environment who finally succeeds by simply sitting and watching the power games around her, although it is intimated that in doing so, she loses something too.  As Rutherford's sister Ann who runs the household despite his many whinges, Barbara Marten is dessicated and as brittle as chalk after years of simply existing.

Lizzie Clachan's set aids the feeling of heavy claustrophobia with seemingly no natural light allowed into the fussy, genteelly cluttered living room and the lamp-lit lighting of Charles Balfour also keeps the Rutherford family trapped in glowing gloom.  I will have to ask Owen if Simon Money's vocal coaching was up to speed to a naturally north-east ear!  If I had to find fault I would suggest that the 6-women choir that opens each act doesn't quite provide the haunting aural experience that was intended.

 

RUTHERFORD AND SON is playing until 3rd August and I recommend it very much; hopefully this revival will show that Githa Sowerby's play is not just a curiosity but one of the best plays of the early 20th Century.

TARTUFFE: THE IMPOSTER at the Lyttelton, National Theatre - Sing Out, Tartuffe!!

355 years after first appearing on stages, Molière's wily Tartuffe seems to be more popular now than ever: Molière's idea of a rich family almost being dismantled by a holy man who has been invited into their home only for him to be exposed as a fraud, seems to fit any number of rewrites and emphasis: the gullible rich who adopt new spiritual fads to cover their shallowness, or the Holy Fool who is punished for daring to break through society's glass ceiling.

First performed in 1664, the play was immediately banned by Louis XIV, not because he was personally offended, but because of outrage by the Catholic church in France over the idea that someone who purports to be a holy man is in fact a lecherous charlatan - the very idea!  A few years later, Molière rewrote it but that too was banned so he tinkered around with it again and when finally performed in 1669 the play was a success.

John Donnelly has pitched his version right into the London of today - his Tartuffe could easily have wandered off from Waterloo Bridge's climate change protesters - and in his final denouncement of the rich fools he has infiltrated, Tartuffe made some very topical jabs at their eternal hatred of the other, the imposter, the foreigner.  In a huge North London living room, overshadowed by a gold full-size replica of Michelangelo's 'David', former politico Orgon has turned his family upside down by inviting into their home a scruffy, soap-dodger called Tartuffe who claims to be the leader of a new religion that can lead believers to the New Dawn.

This modern-day Rasputin has totally won over both Orgon and his mother Pernelle but Orgon's trophy wife Elmire and his spoilt children Damis and Marianne are less convinced and suspect Tartuffe to be leaching off them.  Soon Tartuffe's equally squalid supporters are making a nest for themselves in the living room and Orgon has in a moment of spiritual weakness, given Tartuffe incriminating evidence that he committed crimes against the state "in the last ill-advised war".

When Elmire finally convinces Orgon that Tartuffe has been wanting to have sex with her all along, Orgon orders him out of his house.  But Tartuffe returns with a bailiff called Loyal who instead hands the shocked Orgon a writ informing him that it's the family who must leave because Orgon gave Tartuffe the deeds to the house.  Tartuffe is triumphant... but is he?

Blanche McIntyre's production played more like a farce with people popping out of hiding places and flying over the furniture so the darker elements of the characters was lost; in Donnelly's script they all had the depth of a Comic Strip special - sexy wife, yuppy daughter, rich fool, wily imposter - but it was only in the last moments that Molière's savage satire made itself really known which over-tipped the play.  However there were more than enough laugh-out-loud lines and the main principals took you along with the freewheeling antics.

The really annoying thing I found about the production was a bad case of inaudibility among quite a few of the supporting members of the cast who could not throw their lines out into the auditorium - it might be more realistic to speak your lines directly to whoever you are in the scene with but it made for a lot of the mumbled lines as they were not also including the audience in - now a new breed of actors from smaller venues are appearing on the large National stages, they really need to be told how to play to the bigger houses.

No such problems with the central pairing: Broadway veteran Denis O'Hare was hugely charismatic as the imposter Tartuffe although the idea to have his character speak in a bizarre mash-up of Brazilian and/or French strangled some laugh lines unnecessarily; we know he is 'other' to Orgon's family there was really no need to do it, better he just played it in his natural US accent.  He was very well-partnered by Kevin Doyle's Orgon, a man hoist by his ostentatious petard thanks to his own gullibility.

Susan Engel was at her imperious best as Pernelle and Olivia Williams was a shrewish Elmire, driven to screeching distraction at her husband's blind stupidity.  Kitty Archer was good fun as the whiny, entitled Marianne and her lover, the Socialist Marxist poet Valere was played well by Geoffrey Lumb.  I also wanted to highlight Matthew Duckett as the wide-boy Loyal who made an impression in a relatively small scene.

Robert Jones' huge elaborate set made me want to explore the rest of Orgon's house to see it it was as ghastly as that room and Toby Park gets a shout-out for his physical comedy routines.

I am glad I have finally seen TARTUFFE onstage - as I said it's done often so it was only a matter of time before seeing it - and while I enjoyed a lot of it and the performances, I suspect a less comedy-driven production might show why it has remained such a mainstay of our stages.

Theatre of War: WAR HORSE at the Lyttelton Theatre; THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER Mixed Programme at Covent Garden

As was expected, the theatre also marked the Centenary of the end of Word War I in November and I saw two of the productions that marked the event.

First off was the more obvious one, the National Theatre's game-changing production of WAR HORSE which had been on manoeuvres around the country before reaching the Lyttelton Theatre stable for an extended stay until the start of January.

As Mr and Mrs World know by now, WAR HORSE is based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo about Albert Narracott who, although under-age, joins up to find his beloved horse Joey who has been sold to the army and is somewhere on the Western Front; while there boy and horse both experience the carnage of war at first hand.  I was lucky to see both the original 2007 production and the 2008 revival, both at the Olivier Theatre and both were very moving, involving productions - just ask Stephen Sondheim who was a blubbing wreck in 2007 on the night we went!

It then moved to the New London Theatre where it had an amazing run from 2009 to 2016.  Joey has since become a mainstay of many Remembrance celebrations, a genuine iconic presence.  I had such vivid memories of the show that it was a surprise that it was nearly ten years since I had seen it last so another visit was definitely on the cards.

The good news is that Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris' production - here re-directed by Katie Henry - still delivers the emotional crescendo which had the Lyttelton audience sobbing and sniffing and there are certain images that are indelible once you have seen them, however...  it is a given that no one really goes to see WAR HORSE for the cast's performances - Nick Dear's adaptation is more weighted towards Joey, his equine rival Topthorn and the Narracott's family goose - but even by these standards the anonymity of the performances was quite astonishing.

Thomas Dennis as Albert hardly registered and, as his irascible father Ted, Gwilym Lloyd huffed and puffed to very little effect.  There is also a very odd performance from Ben Ingles as the supposedly-sympathetic officer Lt. Nicholls who promises to care for Joey - it was nothing I could really pinpoint but I wouldn't trust him with a My Little Pony toy, let alone our plucky Joey.  Even the usual laugh-generator role of the f-ing Sgt Thunder went for nothing in Jason Furnival's hands.

However I would like to praise Peter Becker as the caring German officer Friedrich Muller who helps Joey and Topthorn when they are captured on the wrong side of No Man's Land, he at least convinced that Muller was a three-dimensional character.  Jo Castelton as Rose Narracott also found some depth as Albert's careworn but worried mother and the John Tams' songs were well sung by Bob Fox.

The best performances were unsurprisingly by the Handspring life-size puppets of Joey, both foal and horse, Topthorn and - yes - the goose.  The puppeteers invested them all with character and emotions which made it very easy to forget the actors and concentrate on them.  In particular, the scenes where  Joey and Topthorn were commandeered by the German army as pack-horses were full of unspoken pathos, none more so than Joey's gentle nuzzling of Topthorn as he dies, exhausted and broken.  The excellent touch of Topthorn's demise being made real by having his puppeteers slowly emerge from the puppet and slowly walking offstage is incredibly effective.

I did feel something was lost in the transfer to the proscenium stage but Rae Smith's spare design, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler's remarkable puppet design and Paule Constable's lighting still delivered, as did Adrian Sutton's score.  I am glad I experienced WAR HORSE again, but just wish that most of the human cast had invested their roles with the passion that the puppeteers did.

A few days later we saw a more intriguing response to the Centenary, the Royal Ballet's premiere of THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER, which was part of a mixed programme with Wayne McGregor's INFRA and the late George Balanchine's SYMPHONY IN C.

The ballet took as it's inspiration the recorded memories of WWI veteran Wally Patch and a contemporary of his, Florence Billington, who in voice-over remember the quiet and lonely devastation they felt at the deaths of friends and a boyfriend respectively.  These spoken memories are interwoven with the lush, sombre score by film composer Dario Marianelli to create an absorbing soundscape to Alastair Marriott's choreography which illustrates the story of Florence and her beau Ted Feltham; from their meeting at a social dance before the war to his enlisting and subsequent death on the battlefield, cradled by Patch as he dies, to Florence receiving the news by telegram to Ted viewing it all from another place.

The ballet was visually stunning with a fractured, broken video playing on the scrim of contemporary footage of the call to arms in 1914 to the solemn procession of the coffin of the Unknown Soldier in 1920, which eventually raised to reveal Es Devlin's minimalist design of rotating flat panels which were played upon by Bruno Poet's stark lighting to create sweeping changes of tone across the stage while the reminiscences of Patch and Billington were heard.

There were good performances from William Bracewell as Ted and Anna Rose O'Sullivan as Florence but in the cold light of day the ballet failed to move; Marriott's choreography was nice to watch but detracted from the pathos of the spoken testimony of individual loss.  There was no profundity in the thoughts behind the movements but more importantly the very real disconnect between the spoken remembrances of the Western Front's living Hell and the precision and athleticism of the male dancers was too strong to ignore.  The piece ultimately felt like there was no real artistic need for being there, it was a commission to fill a brief in the programming.  I also read somewhere the jibe that he can't be THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER if we know his name was Ted Feltham!

The three ballets in the mixed programme seemed to have been selected to counter-point each other, there was no linear connection between them other than to show off the versatility of the Royal ballet company.  McGregor's INFRA from 2008 had twelve dancers hyper-extending in solos and groups to McGregor's signature taxing choreography while above them Julien Opie's illuminated silhouettes walked in solipsistic silence left and right.  It's an obvious leap to get what McGregor is illustrating - the tortured souls underneath those anonymous walkers - but after a while you long for a resolution.  But always good to hear Max Richter's music...

But then the mood was turned on it's head again with George Balanchine's glorious SYMPHONY IN C, danced to the music of Georges Bizet.  Premiered in 1947 in Paris but extensively re-thought for New York City Ballet the following year, Balanchine drew on his extensive knowledge of the Russian classical tradition from his teenage years with the Imperial Ballet and from his years with the Ballet Russes in the 1920s.

Broken down into four movements with new performers for each, SYMPHONY IN C is a whirlwind extravaganza of pure classical technique: it's like every classical ballet finale with the narrative and named characters removed so you can just concentrate on solos, pas de deux and ensemble routines.  With over 50 dancers onstage as it reaches it's conclusion, it felt so impossibly sumptuous and showy that I almost expected a camera crane to swoop in and a director to yell "cut", such is it's feel of a Hollywood musical idea of a big ballet number.

The four couples were excellently danced by Natalia Osipova, Sarah Lamb, Reece Clarke, Marcelino Sambé, William Bracewell, Anna Rose O'Sullivan, Yuhue Choe and Luca Acri.  It was by far the most memorable piece of the evening and rather put the others in their place.

I would definitely see SYMPHONY IN C again, I am happy to have seen THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER and INFRA but think I would pass on seeing them again.  However as I said earlier, the mixed programme was a wonderful showcase for the talents of the whole Royal Ballet company.