New Wimbledon Theatre, London
February 13, 2024
Varna is a familiar name in the ballet world because of its famous biennial competition but less so because of its ballet company. The touring company presently on a whistlestop tour of the UK is not the main home ensemble, but one of younger dancers recruited from around Europe. While they certainly do a job in taking ballet to towns that see it all too rarely, attracting new audiences along the way, sadly, they do not match the prestige of their home city’s illustrious competition in any way.
The synopsis of the company’s version of Swan Lake is credited to Vladimir Begichev, Vasily Gelzer, Tchaikovsky himself, Julius Reisinger, Konstantin Shilovsky, Karl Waltz and Ivan Vsevolozhsky, no less. While it harks back to the original (much research was done into the libretto and score), it just goes to show how the many alterations over the decades have improved the ballet. Varna’s production makes flimsy dramatic sense and produces a rather muddled story.
The libretto and music changes have in turn led to significant alterations to the choreography. Sergei Bobrov has not only tinkered with the familiar Petipa/Ivanov/Gorsky version, but also designed some of what must be among the more garish costumes the ballet has ever seen. Full of clashing colours, they evoke very little sense of period, any period.
Photo Varna International Ballet
On top of that, while acknowledging the needs of a tour like Varna’s, a 21-piece orchestra is never going to do justice to one of the most glorious scores ever written for ballet. Conductor Peter Tuleshkov was always going to have a challenge balancing the sound with only eight string players, but it was made worse by the poor intonation of them and the brass, and a clarinettist apparently only to be able to play forte.
It doesn’t start well, Act One opening with Siegfried reading a book, the story of which was projected onto the backcloth using weak animations. Again, the needs of touring call the tune, but surely something rather more inspiring could have been done.
Act One takes place in a ballroom, where the handful of women find themselves in either sickly pink or acid yellow skirts, and are unfathomingly accompanied by not one but five jiggling jesters in shiny suits. No glitter in the choreography though.
The Queen’s lurid purple frock would have made Barbara Cartland blush. It certainly made Roberta Estrela look more like a pantomime villainess than a dignified head of state. She knights Siegfried with a ludicrously long and very fake-looking sword, before sending him on his way, barely reacting to his refusal to marry and thus secure the dynasty.
At the lakeside, where the atmosphere was not helped by noisy puffs of smoke ejected from each wing as if two camp fires had suddenly been extinguished by buckets of water, most of the Petipa/Ivanov white act choreography remains. Unfortunately, there was little meaningful interaction between Vittorio Scole’s Siegfried and Martina Prefetto’s Odette, or communication of credible characters.
The corps filled the stage with reasonable accuracy but sounded like a troupe of Lancastrian clog dancers. Noisy stage or noisy shoes, it was hard to say. Arms flapped rather than rippled, although the image was not helped by droopy wisps of fabric that dangled down.
At the ball, what is one of Tchaikovsky’s loveliest waltzes is hacked to pieces by interspersing it with the fanfares that herald the character dancers, whose gaudy and ghastly costumes were only matched by the poverty of the choreography. The weakest by far is the Spanish. The way the men thrash the stage with their capes in between wafting them feebly, would have any bull dying of laughter.
The production has Odette and Odile played by different dancers, the latter here by Mara Salvaggio. The characterisations left little to distinguish between them, Salvaggio, while technically being among the better dancers on show, also being quite blank-faced and without an ounce of flashiness. The return to the original score and thus the placing of the music these days used for the fouettés in middle of Act One does not help any. But worst of all is the total lack of any sense of betrayal.
It all ends with a flock of mixed black and white swans, from which Siegfried rescues Odette having chased Rothbart off. She revives and they live happily ever after.
There is a place for companies like Varna International Ballet. Relatively little of the country has access to the artform on any sort of scale. And the audience, many of whom appeared not to be regular balletgoers did seem to enjoy the performance. But they do deserve something with a rather more lustre.