Flaubert’s Madame Bovary comes to rich balletic life at the Staatsballett Berlin

Deutsch Oper, Berlin
January 18, 2024

New artistic director, Christian Spuck has made an excellent choice for his first creation for Berlin Staatsballett. He has a back catalogue of successful full evening narrative ballets from his tenure in Zürich and Emma Bovary’s story offers rich pickings. Gustave Flaubert’s bored middle-class housewife is raised to literary heights by the novel’s rich romantic language and Spuck follows suit in high choreographic art in Bovary. He opens on a tableau of the characters and enhances the narrative with spoken extracts from the novel, surtitled in English. These do little to explain the narrative which flows with clarity, but they serve to add poetic depth to the work.

The evening belongs to Weronika Frodyma who brings Emma Bovary to life. She and long-suffering husband, Charles, played by Alexei Orlenco, stand side by side like dolls on a wedding cake while the happy guests enjoy the dance. Only later do the couple dance together, tentatively and politely as Emma slowly realises this is not the love she dreamed of.

It is at the society ball that she comes alive. Dressed in a silken yellow ballgown she flits like a butterfly from man to man while Charles hardly notices. The contrast between the glamour and excitement of the ball and her drab provincial life feeds her despair and is central to the choices she makes. She pursues Léon, a student, who is too shy to express his feelings and soon departs.

The agricultural fair offers another social gathering, lively folk dance and the meeting with Rodolphe, the suave David Soares. Emma has found a lover and the pas de deux are ecstatic. However, the feelings are not reciprocal. Rodolphe tires of her and in her despair, she contemplates suicide.

Emma’s extravagant lifestyle is cleverly portrayed by the regular visits of Monsieur Lheureux, played by Dominik White Slavkovský, armed with his book of promissory notes to sign. He is one of the five black clothed men, including Matthew Knight as the Apothecary, who hound the young wife playing on her weakness in choreography that balances neatly between high comedy and repulsion.

Act 2 opens in Rouen, where Emma searches for meaning in her life in the gaudy vaudeville entertainers. She again meets Léon, but the intensity of her passion seems to drive him away. Frodyma, who is on stage for much of the evening now reaches the gruelling climax. Wearing a voluminous white dress, that accentuates her fragility and vulnerability, she sees her life dissipate. She offers herself to Rodolphe and is cruelly rejected. She is shunned by the townsfolk and even the faithful Charles can offer no comfort as the couple barely seem to inhabit the same world.

Slavkovský returns wielding his pen like a stiletto blade, demanding money and rejecting her body which she offers. Knight arrives with the bottle of arsenic powder and the ballet takes a surreal turn as he films her stuffing her mouth with the poison. The video projections (by Tieni Burkhalter) bring her drawn face into close-up and are brutally alternated with farmyard scenes of animal slaughter. For all her naive pursuit of romance and luxury your heart goes out to this tiny figure who wanted so much. Frodyma lives the character in a brilliant performance that demands so much in technique, stamina and dramatic ability and which she delivers the full quota.

The pas de deux are central to the drama and Spuck provides choreography of heightened physicality and athletic fervour. The ballet has a huge cast who are given plenty of opportunities in the elegance of the ballroom, the festivities at the wedding, the riotous dance at the fair and circus glamour. He also has a corps of duet couples dressed in non-period dance clothes who add an otherworldly, metaphysical background. The music is an eclectic mix, potent, mainly modern including works by Camille Saint-Saëns, Thierry Pécou and György Ligeti but it is the song, She was by Camille, plaintive, repetitious and thin, that adheres like a limpid in the memory. It seems the very embodiment of Emma’s condition.