Giselle is my favourite among the 19th-century classics. Blessed with a charming score by the melodically fertile Adolphe Adam and a serviceable but resonant plot, the drama – loosely based on a story by Heine – holds water without being swollen by superfluous divertissements. Its principal characters – the village maiden Giselle and her nobleman-in-disguise seducer Albrecht – are complemented by strongly drawn subsidiary figures: Giselle’s jealous swain Hilarion, her anxiously protective mother and the merciless Queen of the Wilis who presides over Giselle’s afterlife. There’s plenty for the corps to do, as well as a jolly pas de deux in which younger dancers get a chance to shine as merry peasants. And it’s all done and dusted in two acts and less than two hours.
In the absence of any detailed record, precisely what was danced in the first production in Paris in 1841 can’t be reproduced: too many hands have tinkered and modified the text since then. Mary Skeaping’s production for English National Ballet is generally considered to be as close to the intentions of the original choreographers Coralli and Perrot as the surviving evidence allows, restoring some mime sequences and showing Giselle dying of a broken or weak heart rather than violent suicide.
Sir Peter Wright’s version, however, has had the wider circulation. In the repertory of some 15 companies globally – including the Royal and Birmingham Royal Ballet – his editing irritates purists but has the advantage of narrative simplicity. It is Wright’s model that the former Royal and Birmingham Royal Ballet star Miyako Yoshida has largely but not slavishly followed in a staging she has commissioned for the National Ballet of Japan, the company she
now directs.
Over more than half a century, I’ve witnessed many wonderful interpreters of the title role – Natalia Makarova, Lynn Seymour, Gelsey Kirkland, Evelyn Hart, Alina Cojocaru and Natalia Osipova spring to mind, as well as the sublime Galina Ulanova on film. Like so many challenges facing a great ballerina, it requires a switch between earthly and unearthly personas: in the first act she must appear shy, impulsive and vulnerable – a lively but naive rustic innocent; in the second ‘white’ act, she transforms into a serenely disembodied will-o’the-wisp, both human and not.
Yoshida’s Giselle, Yuri Kimura, may not be among the elite at this point – in the first act, she was too much the daintily simpering Miss Muffet, not enough the gauche wide-eyed peasant that Ulanova made so vivid. But she danced with sparkling feet and eloquent arms, transformed in the second act into an exquisite wraith, swathed in clouds of white tulle and gently forgiving sorrow for the faithless Albrecht.
This ranks as one of the best productions of Giselle I have ever seen
In all other respects, this ranks as one of the best productions of Giselle I have ever seen. With help from a British choreographer Alastair Marriott and designer Dick Bird, Yoshida has thoughtfully honoured tradition, not least by paying exceptional attention to the clarity of the mime through which the plot is delivered. The result is a performance of stylistic maturity and irresistible charm. The jibe that the Japanese follow instruction dutifully but don’t convey emotion was squarely disproved here, with Takuro Watanabe presenting a fiercely choleric Hilarion, Yui Negishi a positively chilling Queen of the Wilis, and Takafumi Watanabe every inch the romantic nobleman as Albrecht. The corps was admirable – here, at least, the Japanese reputation for drilled discipline was justified – animated in the bucolic first act, seraphic in the second.
In more peaceful times, July would bring either the Mariinsky or the Bolshoi to London. This year Yoshida’s excellent troupe proved a welcome substitute: the fine impression it leaves means that the Royal Ballet has its work cut out when it revives its own production of Giselle next season.
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