‘Still Life’ at the Penguin Café

Good ballet, like opera, is such a demanding and hugely satisfying medium that it can sometimes leave you speechless and over-awed at the end of a performance. This is clearly not a good thing if you have to turn out a five-hundred-word review by noon the next day.

Such was the case with Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Penguin Café, three short pieces E=mc², Tombeaux and Still Life at the Penguin Café, which is on this week at the Birmingham Hippodrome. So taken with it was I that I would happily have sat in the Hippodrome all night, slowly savouring each moment in the hope that I would still be there when the curtain went up the following night.

Mass E=mc2

I much prefer modern to classical ballet and luckily for me the Birmingham Royal Ballet usually includes a good helping in each of their programmes. Earlier this year I saw the excellent Lyric Pieces which was playing with the wonderful Pineapple Poll.

Exquisite is not a word I ever use. It’s not

Manhatten Project

in my everyday vocabulary but I am pushed to find another one to sum up last night’s performance. The whole thing was breathtaking and faultless from first to final curtain and it’s rare you can say that about a show.

In football parlance, it was an evening of three halves. The first was dramatic, the second sad and the third fun, with some sad bits. The Penguin Café programme started off with E=mc² which won the last-ever ITV South Bank Show Award for Dance in 2010. Danced to a specially commissioned score by Australian composer Matthew Hindson, the piece was divided into four sections depicting Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. It was the third part, Manhatten Project, that was the mind-blower. The score up until this point had certainly been contemporary, scientific even, but for the A-bomb sequence the volume was turned up to eleven and our seats began to rattle, literally. It was like being inside a jet engine or more to the point, a furnace. All this while a solitary Japanese girls danced wistfully centre-stage wearing a beautiful white kimono and holding a blood-red fan. Potent stuff. This was one of the most powerful moments I have witnessed on stage in a long time.

Tombeaux

The second piece Tombeaux was altogether a more sombre affair with choreographer David Bintley in reflective and melancholic mood. It was a lament, firstly to Bintley’s disillusionment with, and perceived end of, British ballet. It also mourns the death of his friend and mentor, the iconic Sir Frederick Ashton. Tombeaux is presented as a pseudo-classical ballet, but all blacks and deep, rich colours to the haunting music of William Walton’s Variations on a Theme by Hindesmith. There are many references to ballet’s classical repertoire not least, Swan Lake. The final tableau was sublime.

Completing the triple bill is one of Bintley’s best-known ballets, ‘Still Life’ at the Penguin Café. This again was divided up into small, surreal segments which were mainly very funny but at times, quick as a flash, turned to tragedy. The penguins and all the other animals were great fun but I particularly liked The Ecstasy of Dancing Fleas, a Humboldt Hog-Nosed Skunk Flea (I am assured) performing with a troupe of Morris Dancers, bells and all. Laura Day excelled in this Strictly Come Hopping sequence. I also liked Joseph Caley’s endearing portrayal of a Texan Kangaroo Rat in Long Distance.

I loved the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Penguin Café to distraction. The whole thing was exquisite – there, I’ve said it again. – Michael Hasted