Great Gatsby ballet puts flapper frocks and jazzy score to the fore — review

Ballet yearns for stories but not all stories want to be danced. Two current revivals, Woolf Works by the Royal Ballet and The Great Gatsby by Northern Ballet, tackle the problem in very different ways. Wayne McGregor’s 2015 triptych (currently at London’s Royal Opera House) seeks to mesh the subject matter of Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves with Virginia Woolf’s own life (and death). His handling of these literary landmarks is at times bafflingly allusive but the staging, the projections and Lucy Carter’s virtuoso lighting installation are a delight in themselves and the three Woolves — Alessandra Ferri and debutantes Natalia Osipova and Marianela Nuñez — each offer a fascinating study of a great mind in meltdown.

Meanwhile at the Grand Theatre in Leeds, David Nixon’s 2013 Gatsby offers a more literal treatment of his source material but manages to dodge most of the Downtonesque period drama clichés. There was always a danger that this tale of moral turpitude in high life — published only a month before Mrs Dalloway — could descend into melodrama, but Nixon does his best to breathe life into Fitzgerald’s cipher-like characters and handles the more sensational scenes with restraint. Like McGregor, he has to tackle the staging of reminiscence, but his handling of flashback is much more straightforward: the pensive Gatsby upstage, his uniformed young self downstage in bluish light dancing with Daisy or negotiating with a string of bootleggers.

Nixon’s storytelling is aided by Jérôme Kaplan’s intelligent lighting and elegant, fast-moving scenery: billowing nets for the drawing room, a pair of petrol pumps and a grimy glazed wall for Wilson’s garage. Dress figures hugely in the novel — “such beautiful shirts!” — and Nixon’s costumes spring straight from Fitzgerald’s prose. The flapper frocks are realised in gossamer silk chiffons for maximum danceability: “ . . . their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.”

The main characters also take their physical cues from the novel. The adulterous Myrtle is steamily danced by Helen Bogatch “as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering”. Gatsby’s rival, alpha male Tom Buchanan, is brought persuasively to life by Joseph Taylor’s manspreading bully: “ . . . a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body”.

The corps de ballet, looking keen and sharp under new director Federico Bonelli, are given logical pretexts for some serious dancing (and singing) in the gin-crazed party scenes with a nifty variation for scene-stealing new boy Jun Ishii in the white tie Charleston. The score, a jazzy patchwork of Richard Rodney Bennett and 1920s popular song, is played by the Northern Ballet Sinfonia in dance band mode under Daniel Parkinson’s frisky baton.

At the novel’s heart is the lone, lost figure of Gatsby himself, danced on Thursday afternoon by the dashing Ryoichi Hirano, who made short work of the fiddly pairwork and the circusy one-armed lift. The Royal Ballet guest is a powerful and versatile dancer actor who can infuse despair into the simplest slump of the shoulders, but Nixon’s Gatsby doesn’t really give him enough to do and we never quite glimpse the thug beneath the handstitched haberdashery.

★★★☆☆

‘Woolf Works’ to March 23, roh.org.uk. ‘The Great Gatsby’ touring to Leeds, Sheffield and London to May 20, northernballet.com