Tender is the night: Up & Down by Eifman Ballet of St Petersburg

London Coliseum
December 6, 2016

Charlotte Kasner

Eifman’s Leningrad New Ballet was founded in a very different world in 1977 to that of today: one which few could have imagined would emerge. Leningrad has reverted to its original Germanic name of St Petersburg and modern ballet is now mainstream in Russia and its environs, not confined to a few permitted experiments within the major companies and rarely shown to outsiders. That said, Eifman still stands head and shoulders above many other companies.

Boris Eifman’s theme in Up & Down is the archetypal moral confusion of 1920s America as outlined by Scott Fitzgerald in his 1934 novel, Tender is the Night. Often glossed over as the Jazz Age with fringed flappers and chic glamour, the 1920s was an era where many people felt that they had lost their way. Geographical realities and political strategies left the United States as a major, wealthy power after the end of the First World War, while the damaged generation that survived it struggled with continuing poverty. There were war profiteers all over the world and America was no exception. Modern psychiatry developed from its beginnings in the late 19thC to be a global phenomenon as shell shock and manias became medicalised.

It is in this world that we meet Dick Diver, a talented and dedicated psychiatrist who is persuaded to take on a new patient, Nicole Warren, a wealthy socialite. As he slowly returns her to health, he becomes convinced, assisted from prompting by her father, that she cannot remain well without him and they marry. They enter the world of Jay Gatsby, tailored clothes, beach parties, jazz and Hollywood starlets form the newly emerging movies. Isolated from dedication to medicine, Diver becomes increasingly corrupted. He obsesses over a Hollywood starlet and turns to drink, getting into brawls, while Nicole pursues her own affair. Eventually, he is chewed up and spat out by the rich people who briefly used him to their advantage.

Oleg Gabyshev’s Diver is lithely intense in everything that he does, be it his dedication to his patients, Nicole or his eventual dissolution. He is given plenty to work on, as are the Company. Eifman packs more interest into the first five minutes as many choreographers do an entire evening. Each patient explores their own mad quirks: a giant doll, a chair, suspenders. They skip, straight jacket sleeves flailing the air and entwine themselves in each other and their props. Diver attends to each, jiggling a head here and dancing a duet of madness there.

Lyubov Andreyeva’s Nicole bursts in on them, frantically flapping, her steely legs and feet stabbing. Traumatised by being raped, she gradually begins to trust Diver who, challenging her father, discovers that he is the culprit. Money buys him off however. Nicole conjures up a sinister twin and together they wrestle with her sanity in a crazy, frightening mirror of each other. Canny with the acute perception that is the gift of the mad, the patients sense which way the wind is blowing and host their own wedding party, crowning Nicole with a veil and brandishing balloons on sticks. They coil into a spiral with Diver and Nicole as the centrepiece and then trail off, leaving the couple to their ‘honeymoon’. Gradually Nicole folds into Diver and sits meekly on her suitcases as he wheels her to freedom and his new life.

Maria Abashova’s starlet Rosemary Hoyt is a Gloria Swanson double, haughtily taking over the beach as the bathing belles of the chorus admire from their roped-off enclosure. Eifman gives her lots of excellent business with a multi-coloured parasol which she uses to flirt, first with the photographers pursuing her and then the infatuated Diver to whom she half contemptuously tosses it as she is carried aloft off stage.

Nicole and Diver dance an argumentative pas de deux, the parasol becoming a weapon between them, but it is too late, the seeds of his downfall have been sown. They party as the dancing jazz babes surround them, now moody, now wild. Rosemary glides in and out. They watch Rosemary’s latest film, Caesar and Cleopatra, which Diver has watched being filmed. The rippling six pack of Caesar is shown to be clearly for the benefit of his male lover, his dresser. Nevertheless, he dances a passionate mini-duet with Hoyt in a hilarious parody of, or perhaps tribute to, Crassus and Aegina in Yuri Grigorovich’s Spartacus. Diver drinks.

Diver dances an anguished solo, wrapping his arms around his torso as he once wrapped them round his patients, but they have now all gone. He gets into a bar brawl and is tossed from antagonist to antagonist, now up in the air, now across the stage. Morally and physically broken, he ends up back in his own clinic – this time as a patient.

Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald’s final novel, was never very popular. Whilst it covers the same territory as the perennial favourite, The Great Gatsby, it was seen as being old fashioned on its release in 1934 and has only been quietly heralded as a classic in recent times. Eifman brings it to life with his intense, detailed, honed choreography and dramatic maturity, intelligent use of lighting and judicious stripping away of sub-plot. Almost better than the book.

Up & Down by Eifman Ballet is at the London Coliseum to December 10, 2016. Visit www.eno.org for details.