Dying of the light

It’s a comfort that the creation of a new ballet inspired by French court entertainment can still happen in the amnesiac ballet country that Britain has become. The idea of making a modern-day meditation on the first ballet — Louis XIV’s 12-hour epic Le Ballet de la nuit (1653) — is as intellectual as Wayne McGregor’s roping in of cognitive science as source material. It faces many of the same traps when it comes to capturing that elusive necessity: theatricality. Only David Bintley could do this, deploying his artistic authority as the 20-year director of Birmingham Royal Ballet as any French despot would.

The scheme’s theatricality is innate. Le Ballet de la nuit starred the 14-year-old Louis. He had been king already for a decade and was prodigiously sure of his self-image as the sun struggling to be born through the turbulence of the night. In The King Dances Bintley produces a nice parallel metaphor. Louis brings the female principle of grace and soft-footed legato into a dance style defined by booted men in staccato jumps and stampings — this is a largely male ballet.

And it looks grand, on a small budget, thanks to designer Katrina Lindsay’s good eye. The night-black stage is lit by flaming torches held by an array of romantically handsome men with flowing hair and glimmering black frockcoats. As a corps they define a macho, militaristic surrounding for the lissome William Bracewell as a girlish Louis, trailing long blond ringlets, stepping high on his arched feet like Rudolf Nureyev, and turning slowly in classical arabesque as if to summon up that paragon of British classicism Anthony Dowell.

In theory it’s fine, but theory doesn’t make theatre. A glaring problem is Bintley’s choice of music, a new commission from Stephen Montague of brash unloveliness.