These are hard times for Northern Ballet, whose future funding has been cut by a gut-wrenching 25 per cent, but you would never know it from this production. Boldly, admirably, the company’s artistic director, David Nixon, has staged his new Beauty and the Beast with an opulence to make you feel that the good times are still here. He is Busby Berkeley in Thirties America, doing his darnedest to face down depression with sheer artistic chutzpah. It is really rather wonderful.
The cinematic analogy works in another way, because this show resembles nothing so much as a fabulous silent movie. Each act opens with a stunning tableau, as when Beauty (the lovely Martha Leebolt) sits with quiet dignity in the Beast’s castle, whilst the Beast (a terrific Ashley Dixon) watches her yearningly from within a shining cage; or when the finale is danced in front of what looks like a vast Art Deco organ.
The sets, by Duncan Hayler, shimmer with the other-worldly richness of Cecil B de Mille. The costumes, notably a dress that seems to be made from flowing Bacofoil, are pure Gloria Swanson. The score is a clever cobbling-together of Bizet, Poulenc and others. And the storytelling has the simple expressionist quality of early cinema.
Of course, Beauty and the Beast is not exactly an unfamiliar subject, and it is chiefly the style of the thing that distinguishes Nixon’s interpretation. He does not explore the myth as David Bintley did for Birmingham Royal Ballet, pondering the spiritual oneness between humans and animals, the idea that becoming a “beast” might be enlightening rather than purgatorial. Nixon takes the more conventional route of suggesting that the handsome Prince – excellently done by Kenneth Tindall – must learn humility by being rendered ugly, although with his half-mask and leather-clad musculature the Beast really doesn’t look that bad, more like one of Katie Price’s boyfriends than an outright monster.
That said, the morality of the tale is powerfully projected, not least through smart little allusions to our contemporary obsession with appearances (the piece begins with Tindall coolly preening before three adoring popsies, a scene straight out of Made in Chelsea). And it is exquisitely brought out in a dream sequence pas de trois, in which Beauty and the Prince dance a rapturous love duet while the Beast gambols around them in an agony of despair.
This is very fine indeed. It is also the only truly balletic moment in the show. Not that it really matters: this Beauty and the Beast is an entertainment in which dance takes the form of recitative, an aesthetic experience in which dancers reveal their beauty. As such, it is also a triumphant success.
