The Crucible with Ten Poems

The Crucible with Ten Poems

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

Scottish Ballet's artistic director Christopher Hampson reckons it's over for the triple bill: three disparate short works might offer quantity, but not necessarily quality. So here he's allied Christopher Bruce's Ten Poems with Helen Pickett's new take on The Crucible in a coupling where text functions as a springboard for dance.

It makes for an interesting evening, offering contrasts and challenges that might not suit all tastes but which see the dancers rising to every occasion. Whether or not the choreography grabs you, the performances throughout are compelling, with acting skills coming to the fore alongside finely honed technique.

The programme opens to the rich, vintage cadences of Richard Burton's voice as he intones 10 poems by Dylan Thomas. A lone figure - Andrew Peasgood, as The Poet - responds to the mood of In My Craft or Sullen Art, bringing a sense of Thomas's restless, imperative drive to catch moments in words in movements that stretch out from a centre spot into the darkness. It's almost like an invocation, for what follows in Bruce's choreography are like painterly vignettes, or snapshots maybe of the characters that sparked Thomas's creative impulse. The swaggering bravado of the now-spent force in Lament (Erik Cavallari) or the youthful elan remembered in Fernhill. There's no obvious narrative, no striving for literal matchy-matches of steps to words, but Ten Poems is a lyrical mosaic of love, life and loss that has Thomas at the heart of the choreography.

Helen Pickett's pared-back response to Arthur Miller's The Crucible goes for the vengeful, superstitious guts of the play and compresses the drama into a handful of scenes. Abigail (Sophie Martin) slithering over the married Proctor (Chris Harrison) like a hot slick of more-ish chocolate; the "rave in the wood" where the girls get tranced-up to Jon Hopkins' insidious electronica-slurpings; the duets between Proctor and his betrayed wife (danced with aching dignity by Eve Mutso), where her returning trust leads to some poignant, risk-braving double-work - and all set against ensembles steeped in the body language of Puritanical religiosity. Clever, powerful, inventive, but the parts emerge more impressive than the whole with the dancers in mighty, blazing form.