Ballet Am Rhein/RSNO: Seven

Playhouse, Edinburgh

Run ended

Reviewed by Barry Didcock

Austrian composer Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony premiered in Prague in 1908, six years before the start of the First World War and in the twilight of the great Viennese age of Klimt, Freud, Jung and Schiele. Mahler himself, meanwhile, had been dead 34 years when Allied troops liberated Auschwitz at the close of the Second World War. But it's this later Europe of the mid-20th century – the Europe of turmoil, violence and Holocaust – which serves as the backdrop to Martin Schlapfer's production for Ballet Am Rhein Dusseldorf Duisburg and which is evoked in the austere set and, in particular, by the monochrome costumes. This is ghetto style, but not in a hip-hop sense: Schlapfer's dancers are dressed in black frock coats, white shirts and plain black dresses.

The symphony itself is performed in full by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the baton of Wen-Pin Chien and in each of the five very different movements the dancers tell a variety of stories in duets and combinations.

In the brooding opening sonata they make angular shapes and add a percussive voice to the score by drumming booted feet on the stage. At several points they form up as a train – a telling motif in the context of the Holocaust – and in the second movement, Nachtmusik, they goose-step and punctuate their movements with gestures borrowed from flamenco and folk dance.

Schlapfer is known as a collagist who avoids straight narrative in favour of a series of moods and moments – in that sense he's the Pinterest choreographer – so instead of a story arc we're presented with a collection of vignettes displaying happiness, fear, violence, love, sex.

The choreography does make a journey, though. The spidery awkwardness of the opening passages gradually gives way to a more fluid and classical performance which, by the Rondo-Finale, has near 50 dancers on stage circling a sole ballerina en pointe atop a table. As with everything else in the production, it's an image balanced neatly between austerity and passion.