sarma

Who would have thought possible in this steely age a ballet not only set to Elgar's Enigma Variations, but peopled by Sir Edward and his friends-patently undanceable types? Still, Sir Frederick Ashton has done it, and the Royal Ballet is doing it, and I am astonished at its power to move me. The key - or one of them - to the enigma of the ballet's beauty is the nostalgia inherent in certain things. Lorca once wrote that a flock of sheep bears nostalgia about with it; it need not matter whether one has longings at all relevant to a flock of sheep. I don't think that one needs to have known era, place, or people involved in Ashton's ballet to be beguiled.

The setting is Elgar's house in Worcestershire in the last years of Victoria's reign and of the 19th century. Everything about the ballet has an air of lateness: the composer's lateness in achieving recognition, the ripe late Romantic music, the autumn gardens, the amber of the sunlight. Julia Trevelyan Oman's set and costumes are carefully and poetically authentic. It's the kind of set that I loved as a child - so superreal that it's hard to believe that there actually is a backstage area and not just more lawns and paths. There is a brick entrance, a cut-away view of an interior stairway, hammocks, bicycles, trees from which occasional yellow leaves float. Those friends of Elgar's cryptically enshrined in the variations are conveniently brought together at one of those diffidently friendly house parties at which the guests need speak to each other only infrequently. They wander about the shrubbery-each emerging to do his (or their) variation and then strolling off. At the end, a telegram is brought announcing to Elgar that Hans Richter has agreed to conduct the first performance of the Enigma Variations. Elgar's friends rejoice in his good fortune.

I see most clearly in this ballet what Ashtonophiles rave about. He is best at being quiet; his effects are modest, unflamboyant, but extremely sensitive to the nuances of character. One feels that he doesn't want his inventiveness to show. It' s well-bred choreography, but in this instance without the dullness that the term might imply. Sometimes he creates character through rhythm and through subtle gestural grafts onto the ballet vocabulary. Other times (I like these less), he suggests eccentricities by requiring an eccentric manner of performing straightforward classical steps. He has a fine way with small understated lifts that seem to come with no preparation; the girl's feet make shy conversational steps barely off the ground. There are several of these in a bittersweet duet for Elgar and a very young girl (beautifully done by Derek Rencher and Antoinette Sibley), and in one with more promise of fulfillment between Matthew Arnold's son and Isobel Fitton (Robert Mead and Vyvyan Lorraine). I especially liked two delightfully brusque, erratic solos performed by Alexander Grant and Anthony Dowell; some affectionately conjugal passages between Elgar and his wife (Svetlana Beriosova); a dignified, almost comic, but very touching duet between Elgar and a friend (Desmond Doyle).

Ashton has one peculiarity that I do not like. In almost every ballet of his that I have seen, he contrived to get everyone from previous scenes "dancing" together in a finale. In the case of "Enigma Variations" it's a shame, because it almost results in breaking down the character differences that he has so carefully built up.

He does the same thing in Jazz Calender, but then, Jazz Calender is another story. There are hints that Ashton may have meant it to be funny. Surely so adept a choreographer would never have in seriousness chosen to depict Tuesday's Child (full of grace) as a flirty little piece in a shaggy bunny suit escorted by a couple of spinning-top partners, or have Wednesday's child mourning amid spotted green snakes, or have Friday's children stroke each other in mock-Vegas passion. Richard Rodney Bennett's music is fake Duke Ellington. Whatever the ballet is supposed to be, it didn't make me laugh - except in disbelief.