As the rain comes down and the nights draw in, Birmingham Royal Ballet is offering the salve of the sunniest ballet in the repertory – a shot of warmth to carry its audiences into autumn. Frederick Ashton’s ballet has been performed by the company since 1962, just two years after its premiere. And the current artistic director Carlos Acosta was a fine latter-day Colas, the young farmer whose adoration of the badly guarded Lise provides the motor for this bucolic love story. All of which may explain the loving attention to detail that has gone into this blissful revival.
It does the ballet the great tribute of understanding that if you take care of the steps – of the dancing hens who shake their feathered arms as they wake at dawn, of the young lovers throwing ribbons across the stage as they trace the filigree of their love, or the clumsy suitor more in love with his red umbrella than any girl – then the tenderness and humour will effortlessly emerge.
The 18th-century ballet on which Ashton based his tale was set in France. But Osbert Lancaster’s witty designs – including the glorious frontispiece with homely mugs in the foreground and a windmill on the hill in the distance – transform the setting into an idealised version of the English countryside, where farm workers love their neighbours and dance around a maypole at the end of a long day in the fields.
Yet its charm spreads further than its setting. I once watched the ballet with a group of inner-city children, who were utterly baffled by the idea of a butter churn and scythes, but recognised the dilemma of someone who was in love with a man whose mother doesn’t approve of them – and loved the fact that the interfering mother was performed by a man and let her hair down at a picnic doing a clog dance.
That dance, to John Lanchbery’s lively rearrangement of Ferdinand Hérold’s score, is always a highlight, a conjuring of an English tradition that illuminates the invention of the choreography. On opening night, it was performed by Rory Mackay with wide-eyed pleasure, that caught but didn’t exaggerate the fun.
As Lise, Beatrice Parma is both expressive and deeply musical, with a grace that fills out Ashton’s shifting patterns of movement. The moment, for example, when she stands at the centre of a cartwheel of ribbons, turning serenely on point, has a simple beauty; it’s both technically accomplished and gently puts Lise’s hopes for the future at the centre of the party.
Her rapport with Enrique Bejarano Vidal’s excitable, puppy-like Colas is like that of two children playing at being grown-up, until they are accidentally locked in a bedroom together and suddenly realise the depth of their passion. He has a light jump and a vivid presence, but it’s Gus Payne’s Alain, Lise’s alternative suitor, rich and foolish, who steals the dancing show, with his eccentric beaten jumps, feet turned out, knees together.
All in all, it’s a beautifully coached and affectionate revival, a reminder of Ashton’s gentle genius for comedy, a restoration of a rural idyll that still sheds its light today.
