Simple and sumptuous

I wish the term ‘ballet-theatre’ had not already been snatched and (mis)used by dance historians, for there is no better way to define Will Tuckett’s art: his creations are to ballet what dance-theatre is to modern and postmodern dance. Not unlike some of the most acclaimed performance makers who specialised in the latter genre, Tuckett has taken a recognisable choreographic idiom and combined it successfully with other expressive/theatrical means. His choice, however, was and still is particularly daring; ballet, after all, is not as malleable as modern and postmodern dance techniques and styles. Yet, acclaimed creations such as The Soldier’s Tale, arguably the best theatre translation of Stravinsky’s work there has ever been, have proved that Tuckett’s ‘ballet-theatre’ can be even more artistically refreshing than the now slightly passé dance-theatre. It was evident last week, when Tuckett’s take on the Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht’s ballet chanté or sung ballet Seven Deadly Sins opened at the Royal Opera House. There have been many different stagings of the work since its première in 1933. Some were fully danced works, with the singer relegated to the orchestra pit, while others were less dance-oriented pantomime/dramas engagingly masterminded by eminent directors. Some opted, more or less correctly, for a purely Brechtian reading, while others preferred to go overtly against the principles of the great theatre practitioner.

Luckily, Tuckett has pursued an interpretative line that remains aptly disentangled from any suffocating celebration of the Brechtian aesthetic and/or any intentional desecration of the same. His staging is both simple and sumptuous, immediate and metaphorically rich, light-hearted and politically dense, unsettling at times but never vulgar. There are hundreds of good ideas in each scene, and one feels enjoyably lost in trying to keep up with all that is happening in the various sections of the Brechtian-inspired structure that dominates and breaks up the performance spaces.