Director and Choreographer
Matthew Bourne
Set and
Costume Design
Lez Brotherston
Lighting Design
Paule Constable
Sound Design
Paul Groothuis
Music
Hermann Severin Lovenskyold (from the ballet La Sylphide)
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Highland Fling
by Matthew Bourne
Sadler's Wells
1 - 5 March 2005
There's no escaping Highland Fling is fun. It is an up-dated version of one of the oldest ballets in the repertoire, La Sylphide from 1832. Originally the music was by Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer, but when it was put on by August Bournonville in Denmark a new score was composed by the young Danish composer Herman Løvenskiold. It is this score, and indeed choreography, which has survived not the original. It is also this score, with the additions of Mendelssohn's Wedding March and the Auld Lang Syne, which Matthew Bourne has used for his ten-year old Highland Fling.
La Sylphide is a typical 1820s/1830s story, which was eventually satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan in Iolanthe. Like ETA Hoffmann's Undine, Schumann's Paradise and the Peri, and Marschner's Hans Heiling the story is about the confrontation between mortality and immortality, and Eros and Thanatos (Love and Death). In La Sylphide, in reverse of most of the versions of the story, a young man is bewitched by an immortal and persuaded to leave his bride on his wedding-day, unlike the usual young nymph who abandons all to follow a handsome young knight and ends up losing both her loved one and her immortality. That way round there is a feminist point, in La Sylphide there is a delusional message, which Bourne touches in his allusion to drugs.
Matthew Bourne has transposed the original rural, Scottish setting to a rough, Glasgow tenement, partly to make the work ‘contemporary' and partly to explore some aspects of modern culture, or, as he says, 80s culture. In its campest moments he at least pays a passing nod towards ambiguous sexuality, gay cottaging and female promiscuity. He also alludes to heavy drinking, petty squabbles and other features of low-level city-life. But he explores none of these in any depth, and even the soi-disant tragic ending, in which both James, the picaresque hero, and his seducing Sylphide both die, elicited not a trace of a tear from the audience. James's violence in chopping off the sylph's wings seemed anaestheticised by the jolly japes around. Allusions were made to drugs and parallels with Ewan McGregor and Trainspotting but these darker issues and resonances were not evident in this light-hearted piece which could only boast not black but the palest pink.
I don't think this matters, unless more pretensions were entertained than I could detect. Act One is set in a tenement room, though it is preceded by the lavatories of the Highland Fling, a bar, or night-club. James, burlily danced by James Leece, is every inch the Scottish hero. Handsome, lithe and sexually available Leece plays James's energetic masculinity for all he can. He dominates the action. He is the victim of the sylph, as well as leader of the mortal gang. It's an energetic role requiring many explicit and implicit moods. The former were much more evident than the latter. In a way he seems more a victim of circumstances than a creator , but this adds to the near-poingnacy the end almost elicits. James Leece's performance is full of vitality and athletic prowess, and is very enjoyable at this level if nothing more, but it was not confined to these.
Mikah Smilie as Effie, James's fiancée and bride, is suitably moody and also sexually available, and her characterisation was excellently handled both in movement and looks. Also notable were Adam Galbraith as the best-man and, in particular, Lee Smikle as Gurn. His gestures and movements were as suggestive and deft as anyone's and he played the spurned lover, with his postures and pouts, almost as though he spoke through his body-movements. His performance was a delight. Kerry Biggin's Sylph was as alluring and light-footed as it should be, and she came closest to drawing a tear with her final mutilation by James's garden shears.
Matthew Bourne's choreography is beautifully conceived and superbly danced. Bourne's movements exactly match the music, though at some levels this might seem a disadvantage, as Løvenskiold's elegant Romanticism is rather at odds with the bleaker aspects of Bourne's idea. However, this did not prevent the beautiful scenes of Act Two being witty and occasionally touching, especially where the corps of sylphs tried to ‘immortalise' James, or the sylph and the hero copulate in a car. Some of the troupe scenes in Act One also have many witty moments, even the first attempt James makes to jump out of the rear window, when his vertigo overcomes and he has to be nursed back from his nervous sickness.
The music was performed adequately. It is a pity the orchestra is so heavily amplified. Not only does this make the evening resemble a musical more than a ballet, but whatever subtleties the orchestra brought to the score were lost by the loud levelling the amplification brings. Sometimes, too, the playing was not the best, as the lapse-prone horn player demonstrated.
All these caveats aside, nothing should not deter anyone from going. This is an exhilarating theatrical event, and deserved the applause and part-standing ovation it got. It is easy to understand why this work is a favourite of Matthew Bourne's. It deserves to be that of delighted audiences.
Roderick Swanston
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