Dance

Swan Lake

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

four stars

TCHAIKOVSKY'S score and the names of the main characters – Odette/Odile, Siegfried and his friend Benno – are, more or less, all that choreographer David Dawson has retained from that 19th century classic, Swan Lake. Dawson’s radical new version for Scottish Ballet, premiered in Glasgow this week, has pared away all the regal kerfuffle that rendered Siegfried a Prince. He’s dispensed with Rothbart and his spells: Odette is now her own mythic shape-shifting being, a timelessly elemental force that Sophie Martin made simply electrifying on opening night. Clad, like her ensemble of swans, in a tiny, tight body-suit – there are no tutus here – Martin melded mercurial elegance with a sinuous, spirited energy that entranced Siegfried (Christopher Harrison) and us.

Their first encounter is under a cat’s cradle of metal girders – an emblematic bridge, perhaps, between humankind and Odette’s ‘other’ world. It’s part of a design that majors on grey Scandi-stark, where colour only arrives in the stream-lined frocks of the party-going girls. However the opening party, albeit full of busy dance – and with Andrew Peasgood’s Benno an athletic, outgoing live wire – proves a distinctly long slow start to Siegfried’s rite of passage from naive lonely boy to wiser, lonely man. Harrison has little to do but repeatedly refuse to join in... Odette’s arrival unleashes the power of Harrison’s own technique, and of Dawson’s bold, stripped to the bones, take on Swan Lake’s traditions. His duets for Odette and Siegfried are complex, risky and thrilling. And when Odile vamps him at the start of Act Two – Martin, all witchy and sizzling in a slink of black – Siegfried surrenders, as do we. It’s a production that challenges audiences and dancers – the latter excel, and we are made to think about love, betrayal and unattainable desires as the Scottish Ballet orchestra gives wing to Tchaikovsky.