Giselle. - The Palace Theatre, Manchester, England - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, March, 1995 by Christopher Bower

Derek Deane's new production of Giselle for English National Ballet, his first staging of an evening-length classic since becoming director of Britain's second-largest ballet company two years ago, eschews the work's traditional medieval Rhineland locale in favor of 1920s Austria, as represented by Charles Cusick-Smith's alpine resort setting.

This is dominated by the Stag Hotel, where Giselle works as a humble chambermaid while her mother rules the roost as housekeeper (imagine Cloris Leachman as Mrs. Danvers). It is onto the forecourt of this imposing pile that Count Albrecht arrives in a sleek, chauffeur-driven limousine; yet Deane's production wears twentieth-century verismo lightly on its velvet sleeve (the innovation of trousers, for instance, having yet to make it up the mountains) and the centuries collide in some confusing ways.

The Peasant Pas de Deux is enlarged to a Pas de Six and danced by busboys and waitresses, severely uniformed in grey; but the peasants proper are on hand for the usual grape harvest celebrations. And while the royal party fusses about with its skis, Albrecht's duplicity is still unmasked by the usual discovery of the crest on his sword. If the inconsistencies are ironed out, his act may yet work--the central roles are very convincing, and with a smile as tight as her marcel wave, Albrecht's fiancee Bathilde (Jane Haworth) looks every inch the Eurotrash royal, with her eye on the main chance and the photographer from Hello! magazine.

But if Deane's first scene falls short of expectations, his second act achieves an impressive union of dramatic conviction and stylistic integrity. Within a petrified glade eerily lit with a dusty luminescence by Paul Pyant, Deane presents a marvelous vision. His wilis--led by Susan Jaffe's steely, imperious Myrtha--are no mere romantic sylphs, but vampiric creatures, hollow-eyed and decayed in their green-tinged dresses, and with a deadly malevolence in every sweeping arm and stalking step. Here the ENB corps shows its newfound mettle in a fine display of precision dancing, and the star partnership of Thomas Edur and Agnes Oaks breaks hearts with performances of impeccable and sustained refinement. A pity, then, that Carl Davis's conducting failed to match the visual delights.