The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947, is a book-length poem by WH Auden. Famously intractable and, as Auden himself noted, “frightfully long”, it follows four characters who meet in a wartime bar in New York, discuss metaphysics, undertake allegorical journeys and explore their feelings of existential loneliness. The work won the 1948 Pulitzer prize for poetry, and inspired Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony.
Liam Scarlett’s translation of the poem into dance is a sincere but misconceived exercise. Moment to moment, he wrests attractive choreography from Bernstein’s score, responding with sensitivity to its jazzy sadness and ironic echoes of Shostakovich and Gershwin. All four characters on stage are displaced: Rosetta (Sarah Lamb) is a Jewish retail buyer, Quant (Johannes Stepanek) a world-weary Irish clerk, Malin (Federico Bonelli) a Canadian air force officer, and Emble (Alexander Campbell) a cocky midwestern sailor. Scarlett has teased out the sexual unease which is a significant component of the titular anxiety. Quant and Malin are both gay widowers, Emble is bisexual. For a time, it looks as if Emble and Rosetta are going to hook up when the four end up at Rosetta’s apartment, but Emble ducks the issue by passing out drunk. “Did you lose your nerve/ And cloud your conscience because I wasn’t/ your dish really?” Rosetta muses in the poem.
In fact, she isn’t anyone’s dish, because all four characters, including Rosetta, represent different aspects of Auden. Their displacement, their alienation and their sexual worldview is all Auden’s (“What the American male really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper, he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he’s drunk. Everything else is society,” the poet wrote in 1948). Scarlett, however, treats the four purely figuratively. Ignoring their esoteric inner lives, he concentrates on their outer exchanges, which, shorn of symbolic context, are banal, and make little dramatic sense. The bar scene is a montage of choreographic references to works like Fancy Free and On the Town, the gay cross-currents are reduced to coy kissing and buttock-squeezing, and the piece wraps with a kitsch apotheosis as Malin strides wide-eyed into a golden dawn.
That this is a purely surface rendering of Auden’s poem is emphasised by John Macfarlane’s hyperrealist sets, whose every period-perfect detail distances us from the poet’s mystical imagination. How could the Royal Ballet have got all this so wrong – and so expensively wrong? Britain is amply endowed with experts who could have helped Scarlett unwrap Auden’s text. Perhaps the notion still persists at Covent Garden that a choreographer is a genius to be left alone to work his (and it’s invariably his) magic. There’s certainly no evidence of literary or intellectual quality control. The Royal has a 10-strong music staff at choreographers’ disposal, but no one, it seems, to advise choreographers, and when necessary tactfully redirect them, on matters of concept, theme and story.
Such a person might also have something to say about the increasingly luxurious packaging of ballets. The Age of Anxiety is preceded on the current bill by Kim Brandstrup’s Ceremony of Innocence and followed by Christopher Wheeldon’s Aeternum. Both are technically accomplished if slender works, set to scores by Benjamin Britten. In Brandstrup’s work, an artist, poignantly portrayed by Bennet Gartside, looks back to his vanished youth. In Aeternum, Wheeldon reflects obliquely on war, with Claire Calvert memorably beautiful in the redemptive leading role.
Both pieces have conspicuous design elements which function, at times, almost independently of the ballets themselves. In Ceremony of Innocence Leo Warner’s back-projections offer photographic stills of a monumental brick-built structure and computer-generated images of the rise and fall of the sea. The Age of Anxiety takes us from the bar scene to Rosetta’s apartment, replete with cow-hide upholstered furniture, and thence to an idealised Manhattan cityscape. Aeternum, designed by Jean-Marc Puissant, has an evolving scheme of driftwood planking, which unfurls above the dancers’ heads. Elements like these often look more like style upgrades than creative necessities. In the case of certain recent ballets, their only imaginable function is to distract from the slightness of the work. Many of us would settle for fewer lavish sets and more artistic rigour.