Robert Tanitch reviews Swan Lake at London Coliseum
Swan Lake is every choreographer’s plaything and Tchaikovsky’s score is always a winner.
Graeme Murphy’s radical version for Australian Ballet is hugely popular in Australia: half-modern and half-traditional, it panders to those who want something new and to those who want something old; and it never quite gels.
Amber Scott and Adam Bull in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake
Despite its flaws, and the juggling with the score, the production is entertaining, often dramatic and the horizontal lifts are particularly buoyant. The action is set in the Edwardian era.
Odette marries Prince Siegfried only to find that he intends to continue his relationship with Baroness von Rothbart. A pas de deux becomes a pas de trois.
Audiences in 2002 at the ballet’s premiere in Melbourne instantly saw a parallel with Princess Diana, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Diana had memorably summed up her situation on television: “There were three of us in the marriage and so it was a bit crowded.”
Odette (fragile Amber Scott) has a wedding-dress with an enormous train which she has to manipulate with great skill and not trip over. She expresses her frustration and rage in fouettés and throws herself into the arms of the equerries, one by one, ready to have sex with all of them.
She ends up in a sanatorium run by nuns where she thinks she is a swan and hallucinates about a production of Swan Lake she had once seen
Siegfried (Adam Bull), no Prince Charming, has a major problem on his hands and not a clue how to deal with it
Odette escapes from the sanatorium to gatecrash one of the baroness’s gay soirees. She reclaims her husband and drives his mistress (Domity Azoury) mad before dashing off to the lake to drown herself, disappearing down the plug-hole and the water with her.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website
