Birmingham Royal Ballet have been celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a season of adaptations, and this fine triple bill shows how inexhaustible a fount his writing continues to be. Wink, by the American choreographer Jessica Lang, takes its inspiration from the sonnets. The title is taken from the first line of Sonnet 43, “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see”. The piece sees two couples duetting to a composition by Jakub Ciupinski, whose reverberant strings, like Peter Teigen’s golden lighting, seem to speak of days long past. The elegiac mood is sustained in the second piece (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past”). Rather than attempting to reproduce their wordplay in dance, Lang has sought to convey the sonnets’ contrasting moods and colours. Her choreographic restraint is a joy – solicitous partnering, an unforced cleaving of space – and the balance that she strikes between lyricism and gravity is as satisfying as it is true to its source.
The Moor’s Pavane, created by José Limón in 1949, is a four-hander peopled by the principal characters in Othello, and set to the music of Purcell. The music is stately, but below the dance’s formal surface, lethal rivalries are played out. Tyrone Singleton is a noble but stricken Moor, his body language faltering even as he attempts to assert his authority, and Delia Mathews a gently uncomprehending Desdemona. Elisha Willis, in a subtle and telling performance, is the cynical Emilia, whose role quietly anchors the piece, and Iain Mackay is her husband, Iago. All sinister polish and reptilian stare, Mackay seems to quiver with duplicity. His exchanges with Singleton are rapaciously insinuating; he wraps himself around him like bindweed, proprietorial as a lover.
Singleton reappears as Othello in David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite, a light-hearted dash through the plays set to a jazz score by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The piece wittily caricatures Shakespeare’s better-known couples. Mathias Dingman’s Hamlet is the only solo number, but as he slinks and pussycats around the stage in form-fitting black, we realise he’s duetting with his own split personality. Jasper Conran has fun with the costumes. Angela Paul is a thoroughly stroppy Shrew in sneakers and bridal outfit, and Céline Gittens’s Lady Macbeth is a smouldering, high-kicking megalomaniac in floor-length evening-wear. Mackay’s Macbeth, meanwhile, is a paranoid, swivel-eyed murderer in a zebra-striped kilt, his hair a crown of gelled, vermilion spikes. Bintley has zeroed in on the playwright’s most lethally dysfunctional men: Valentin Olovyannikov dances Richard III with a bizarre, syncopated limp, and Singleton’s Othello is a strutting, dreadlocked monument to the fragility of the male sexual ego.
Willis is Desdemona this time, and is delicately heart-rending. She’s retiring as a dancer at the end of this week, after 12 years as a BRB principal, and will be much missed. Her warmth, fearlessness and straight-from-the-heart performance style made her one of that tiny band of dancers whom audiences truly loved. Brava, Elisha.
