It makes total sense for choreographer-director Jonathan Watkins to turn George, the central figure of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man, into a double person. Isherwood’s point of departure is the profound sense of dissociation induced by grief, and in casting a dancer, former Royal Ballet principal Ed Watson, as George’s body, and singer-songwriter John Grant as his mind, Watkins at a stroke shows us his riven, dislocated self: Watson on the ground, Grant raised on a platform, motion and music operating on different planes.
If Grant’s voice is always fluent, even mellifluous, moving from low growl through easy baritone and even up to eerie countertenor, Watson’s body begins blocked – all angle and effort, no flow. On one level, the piece is the story of its unblocking, through the reawakening of desire: there’s a tennis match that morphs into homoerotic fantasy; there are passionate memories of his dead lover Jim (Jonathan Goddard); a drunken evening with old friend Charley (Kristen McNally), who has desires of her own; and finally a baptismal night-swimming escapade with a student, Kenny (James Hay), that plunges George back into the waters of life.
