Critics round-up: Peter Schaufuss’ Tchaikovsky Trilogy

This prom­ises to be the most fun crit­ics round-up yet. Rarely have reviews been so unan­im­ously foul. Being that there was so little to save, the crit­ics left their stars in the drawer, and pol­ished their meta­phors with seem­ing glee.

No amount of spe­cial plead­ing, of aes­thetic jiggery-pokery, can excuse Schaufuss’s weird lib­retto as it plays its fatu­ous game by way of crass mickey-mousing and dis­mal romp­ing to Tchaikovsky’s ardours.

is Clem­ent Crisp’s response in The Fin­an­cial Times to Peter Schau­fuss’ pro­posal to link three Tchaikovsky bal­lets together as dreams within dreams: A Night­mare (Swan Lake), A ­Sen­sual Awaken­ing (Sleep­ing Beauty) and A Happy Dream (Nutcracker).

Pyotr Ilyich must be revolving in his grave,

remarked David Dou­gill in The Sunday Times.

A Night­mare — Swan Lake

…this is the (unwit­ting, I sup­pose) per­fect descrip­tion of the first sta­ging in a week’s sea­son by the Schau­fuss Bal­let at the Coliseum.

said Crisp. Debra Craine in The Times called it,

Inept, illo­gical, incom­pre­hens­ible and idi­otic, it will either leave you flum­moxed or have you laugh­ing out loud.

Neil Nor­man for The Express had doubt’s about Schau­fuss’ abilities.

His cho­reo­graphic expert­ise fails to meas­ure up to his vault­ing ambition.

His opin­ion was echoed by The Stage’s Sarah Frater.

…he lacks the matur­ity and cho­reo­graphic ingenu­ity to give new form to these immense art works.

An example of the cho­reo­graphy was shared by Gra­ham Watts for LondonDance.com:

The white swan pas de deux was danced – for the most part – hori­zont­ally on the floor as if this was a syn­chron­ised swim­ming duet being prac­ticed on dry land.

Even the set and cos­tumes left a lot to be desired. Here’s what Mark Man­a­han in The Tele­graph has to say:

The “set” – a huge, semi-reflective panel that lines the back of a stage – muddles the action and even looks in need of a good pol­ish. The light­ing is coarse, and, while the swans’ Lycra cos­tumes are pure mid-Eightes ice-dance, the two jesters’ some­how fuse Don­nie Darko’s satanic rab­bit and Pulp Fiction’s put-upon gimp.

A view shared by Watts,

The fif­teen andro­gyn­ous swans looked like bald, plucked chick­ens retain­ing just a breast­plate of feath­ers; the female mem­bers of the court in Act 1 seemed like down­mar­ket show­girls in the nude revue bar of a back­woods mar­ket town, their cos­tumes some­how man­aging to be both sala­cious and drab at the same time.

Ouch! But there must had been at least one redeem­ing fea­ture. Judith Mack­rell for The Guard­ian said that there was.

Its only redeem­ing fea­ture is Alban Lendorf’s Siegfried (who almost single-handedly wins this pro­duc­tion a second star). Des­pite being bundled into a boiled-wool bomber jacket that makes him look both girly and bulky, Lendorf dances hero­ic­ally, the spring and fin­esse of his Danish-trained jump com­bined with juicily express­ive body work.

Thank good­ness. Though this was not true of “the two temperature-lowering dan­seuses who play Odette and Odile” accord­ing to Crisp.

Even the recor­ded music was awful. Dou­gill said they were

…record­ings of appalling sound qual­ity — the strings sound­ing like a sawmill.

Lyndsey Win­ship in the Even­ing Stand­ard wrily sug­ges­ted that,

The bit where the Black Swan indulges the prince in some oral sex is a high­light, though.

A ­Sen­sual Awaken­ing (Sleep­ing Beauty) and A Happy Dream (Nutcracker)

The crit­ics fell away dra­mat­ic­ally after the ‘night­mare’. Dou­gill braved the Sleep­ing Beauty.

Pre­vail­ing impres­sions of The Sleep­ing Beauty are a clut­ter of over­com­plex­it­ies and hec­tic pace, the dan­cing not always suc­cess­fully crammed into the music.

Laura Thompson in The Tele­graph gives us an idea of Schau­fuss’ approach.

Sleep­ing Beauty has been given a madly inap­pro­pri­ate sexual edge: the open­ing scene enacts for us the actual moment of Aurora’s con­cep­tion, then sees her drop to the ground, new­born, as her mother per­forms a deep plié in second position.

Watts, yearn­ing of a fam­ily tree in the pro­gramme notes, points out some logical complexities:

The prince in both bal­lets is also played by the same dan­cer (Alban Lendorf) – wear­ing dif­fer­ently col­oured ver­sions of the same cropped jacket – and yet both princes retain their tra­di­tional name (Siegfried in Swan Lake and Flor­imund in Sleep­ing Beauty) sug­gest­ing that they alone retain sep­ar­ate iden­tit­ies. Yet, if the Queen is the same char­ac­ter in both bal­lets then the prince is her son in one and woo­ing her daugh­ter in the other. That would be weird, even for a Schau­fuss ballet.

Weird indeed.

As these bal­lets also marked the Lon­don return of a great dan­cer, Thompson is bemused by his involvement:

Stand­ing inex­plic­ably onstage in the role of the King, is the former Royal Bal­let prin­cipal Irek Mukhamedov: a great artist in the midst of a shambles.

Craine is in agreement.

If I could award half a star it would go to Irek Mukhamedov who has tre­mend­ous pres­ence as Roth­bart, though I’m not sure what he is meant to be doing in this point­less exercise.

So to sum up, like the enti­cing pull-quotes on West End ads, the crit­ics reac­tion to the Schau­fuss tri­logy is :

* “Hell gaped.” — The Fin­an­cial Times

* “One of the worst Tchaikovsky sta­gings I’ve ever seen.” — The Times

“Unspeak­able” — The Express

* “Fright­ful.” — The Telegraph

“I grappled with responses of irrit­a­tion and dis­be­lief.” — The Sunday Times

 “Clunky cho­reo­graphy, patchy nar­rat­ive, dull energy and so-so per­form­ances.” — Even­ing Standard

** “One of the most ill-conceived pro­duc­tions I’ve seen.” — The Guard­ian

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