This play came very highly acclaimed – critics have been giving it four and five stars all over the place, so despite my ignorance when it comes to ballet, I expected that I’d still enjoy it.
Unfortunately, this was not the case. I could only follow the play insofar as I already knew the basic premise of it – the story of Polish ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, as described by his younger and older self, both on stage at once. This premise was interesting – the interplay between the young, able-bodied genius, and the old, tired man with his life behind him – but for me, the drama fell flat because I didn’t really understand much of it.
The play is two-handed – the older Nijinsky played by James Bryce, the younger by Darren Brownlie; and the scene is set in two sections too – one part is dialogue between the actors, the other part, re-enactments of Nijinsky’s ballets. Obviously there needed to be dance in a play of this nature, but the experimental nature of this left me a little cold (particularly the sections with the puppet) while I enjoyed some of the sections of dialogue immensely. There are some wonderful lines spoken between the two men – lines which I realised (and confirmed afterwards) came from Nijinsky’s own writings about his art. One line, which recurred in the play and stuck in my mind, was a line about ballet, where the older Nijinsky says, ‘No, it’s not difficult. We just jump, and then pause in the air before coming down.’
Writing this review has made me feel rather uncultured, particularly in the face of many other great reviews, but I suppose not everybody likes the same thing. After all, Nijinsky’s balletic interpretation of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring got booed off the stage, so it’s probably a good thing to divide one’s audience. ★★☆☆☆ @BookingAround 4th May 2016
