Nobody tackles narrative ballet like Scottish Ballet. And nobody did white-hot (some might say over-heated) drama like Tennessee Williams. So back in 2012 commissioning a ballet version of his most famous play, detailing the tragic decline of Southern belle Blanche DuBois, was a pretty safe bet. But just to be sure, the company engaged director Nancy Meckler, then well established in drama but new to dance, composer Peter Salem, designer Nicola Turner, and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, a fast-emerging choreographer of Belgian/Colombian descent, then taking on her first full-length ballet. On its first staging in 2015 the piece was, of course, a smash hit, showered with awards in the UK and rave reviews when it later toured to the States.
And now it’s back with the same team, slightly tweaked here and there and with a new generation of dancers taking on those iconic roles. The only question is: what took them so long…? Opening night in Glasgow saw tall, elegant Marge Hendrick as Blanche, petite firecracker Bethany Kingsley-Garner as kid sister Stella and Ryoichi Hirano, guesting from the Royal Ballet, as Stanley.
The shock effect of Marlon Brando and his white T-shirt in the 1951 film predictably unbalanced the story somewhat, but in this production there’s no doubt that it’s Blanche’s night. An opening scene shows her in what will become a recurring motif: alone under a single lightbulb she flutters and turns, reaching for the light like a helpless moth, lost in a world of her own. The Moth was one of the titles Williams considered for the play, describing Blanche as “flighty in movement and frail in appearance”. Throughout, Hendrick is all that and more. A prologue shows us what, in the play, only becomes apparent later: a young, already vulnerable girl falling in love with and marrying her young beau, Alan (Javier Andreu), and the terrible deception of his homosexual liaison and suicide that will haunt her for ever (his bloodstained ghost appears and reappears at key moments, always just out of reach). Their youthful pas de deux, light-hearted and tentative, gives way to a threatening threesome, in which there’s little difference in choreography between man-man and man-woman as they change partners and Blanche’s dismay grows.
Conciseness is the watchword of this production: not a movement wasted. A running time of two hours underlines the tautness of its narrative and the choreographic variety that mines complex emotions, while Turner’s set design employs little more than a pile of milk-crates from which the cast make up furniture, a night club and, brilliantly, a train. At the end of the prologue, the backdrop depicting Blanche’s family plantation home disintegrates, revealing itself to be just a projection on a pile of crates: her world really has come tumbling down. Later, when illuminated, the crates form a neon sign that indicates the one-night cheap hotels where Blanche seeks out the strangers (clients?) on whose kindness she so famously depends.
Lopez Ochoa’s choreography is superbly confident, combining secure classicism with adventurous and sometimes hair-raising modernity. While early moments between Blanche and Stella establish a sweet and caring sisterly affection, Blanche’s arrival in New Orleans reveals at once that while Blanche is fixed in time and choreographic style, still wearing her wedding dress, only exchanged eventually for girlish pastel frills and still fluttering, little sister has grown up, and how. Encounters between Stella and Stanley are dynamite, revealing both his macho violence and the inarticulate need it masks, and her awakened sexuality. Their climactic and startlingly erotic pas de deux and the terrible revenge he later wreaks on Blanche are twinned, both danced in nude underwear that looks as near-naked as onstage will allow, but worlds apart. Tellingly, while Peter Salem can happily turn out jazz-age saxophone riffs and other period music, his underscoring of these heightened moments of passion or violence is almost entirely percussive and deeply threatening.
It’s not all gloom, however. The New Orleans nightclub scenes are lively with jiving characters so cool and loose-limbed as to seem boneless, a trio of raunchy dais-dancing girls, a show-off display from Stanley and a sweet comic turn from what turns out to be Mitch (Jerome Barnes), the would-be beau with whom Blanche might just snatch a moment of happiness. But of course it’s a tragedy. Fragments of Ella Fitzgerald singing Paper Moon evoke make-believe and false hope. Nobody wrote better women characters than Tennessee Williams and few narrative ballets have worked as well as this one.
The production, sold out in Glasgow, tours to Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh before heading out to Orkney and to Stornaway in the Outer Hebrides, allowing the company to resume its core commitment to touring the farther-flung parts of Scotland.
