Cathy Marston's first commission for English National Ballet is one of her most successful works to date. She has always made ballets with some kind of narrative undertow; here she declares her dramatic sources upfront: the sorry tale of Mr and Mrs TS Eliot.
Facing Viv is a piece for six dancers that cleverly accommodates the breakdown of Vivien Eliot's fragile ego and the split voices of her husband's poetry. Three couples represent the Eliots in three different dynamics of their marriage. A duet of sexual tension is followed by a more watchfully grim encounter and a final acknowledgement of distance, broached by brief moments of accord. Each section overlaps, so that we feel the different personae within the marriage scrutinising each other. The ballet closes with the six dancers jerking in and out of choreographed unison, the two Eliots yearning for their fractured selves to mend.
This is a neat structural device and Marston gives it troubling, absorbing flesh. Her first section is the best, the choreography taking off from the jangling momentum of the score, John Adams, Gnarly Buttons. There is a jousting energy in Viv's attempts to fan the flames of their erotic attraction. But when Cindy Jourdain arcs her legs into the space between the pair it is as much defence as a provocation; when Gary Avis tumbles her backwards in vertiginous somersault he treads a knife-edge between abuse and pleasure.
The second and third duets tend to blur: it is as if Marston runs short of material to drive her own narrative forward. But the cast are excellent, and it is startling to realise that this is almost the first time in a decade that ENB has been offered real grown-ups to dance, rather than fairy-tale characters.
Clearly the company would lap up more of the same, although in this current touring programme the other two items are balletic froth: dances from Bournonville's Napoli and the Grand Pas from Petipa's Paquita. The latter does not sit well on the current dancers, but any chance to see the former is always welcome. Bournonville's blithe footwork, with its mild surprises and bubbling inversions, is one of the great but rarely delivered treats of the 19th-century repertory. And even if ENB's dancers don't yet have the right mix of innocent gaiety and sophisticated ease, they are game to try.
· English National Ballet is at Forum 28, Barrow-in-Furness (01229 820000), tonight and tomorrow, and Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells (01892 530613), Friday and Saturday.
