| Dancing Times Magazine August 2004 By Noël Goodwin Telling A Tale My enjoyment of The Soldier's Tale goes back 30 or 40 years to a Berlin production by Jean Babileé as both choreographer and the Soldier. Various choreographers have since taken their chances with it, inevitably with variable results, but the latest by William Tuckett (sorry, "Will Tuckett" now, according to the Linbury programme credits) was more successful than some and notably more entertaining than many. Stravinsky's form of musical theatre on a shoestring, adaptable for wartime touring during his Swiss exile in 1917, was here given quite an elaborate staging for five nightly performances and a matinee in a brilliant set designed by Lez Brotherston that evoked a Victorian suburban music hall, all faded red plush and tarnished gilt, which made the most of the Linbury Studio stage. Its one failure was to confine Stravinsky's "orchestra in miniature" of seven players to a sunken pit instead of putting them in full view at stage level to one side, where the players would contribute their own visual images in performance, as the composer wanted, and their bold tones could cut more sharply than they did here, in spite of the well-pointed conducting of Richard Bernas (a frequent American guest with The Royal Ballet). Not that we were left in any doubt of the expert instrumental playing, all high and low registers and an array of percussion with no thickening harmonies, and the marches, tango, ragtime and waltz given a keen rhythmic inflection at the press night on June 16. The top-line cast benefited from that to the extent of measuring their words and actions to the music's recurring pulse, projecting the moral fable by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz mostly to good dramatic effect, although a few lines failed to come across sufficiently clearly. Will Kemp, from the Adventures in Motion Pictures gang, delivered his Narrator's text somewhat in the manner of a fairground barker, and was given a sinister visual aspect more in keeping with the Devil. The latter was gleefully portrayed in his successive guises by a volatile Matthew Hart, including a pram-pushing and tottering old pedlar woman and a drab tramp before erupting in full horned, hairy and cloven-footed array to claim his victim at the end. Adam Cooper gave a multi-faceted performance as the Soldier, for whom Tuckett had devised suitably mimetic gestures to indicate his violin playing, but he seemed more indifferent than disconcerted by the lack of recognition when he reaches home. At this point he encounters Zenaida Yanowsky, his later Princess, as the girl he left behind, who fails even to know him. She gave a consummate performance as both actress and dancer, from the moment she was first glimpsed as if in her dressing-room, swigging from a bottle, to the sugar-plum Princess in white, choreographed in pointe shoes, dancing a spirited tango and ragtime, and a rapturous pas de deux with her miracle working Soldier. She at any rate redressed the balance between style and character which tilted more to the latter in the early scenes but the audience in general was quickly won over and warmly acclaimed everybody at the end. Click here for production photos |