One man who has been regularly padding out the ranks of male dancers at the Royal Ballet is Ethan Stiefel, guesting from American Ballet Theatre. During the past couple of seasons he has danced Colas in La Fille Mal Gardée and Lensky in Onegin; now he is performing Albrecht in Giselle. The urbane elegance of Stiefel's demeanour and the athletic grace of his dancing have deservedly endeared him to audiences, but the fact that he had trouble moving into top tragic gear in Onegin prepared us for a Giselle in which, disappointingly, all the best effects come in act one.
Stiefel plays Albrecht as a patrician flirt, whose sole intention at the start of the ballet is to have some sentimental fun with a pretty peasant girl. Everything about his manner, from the airy eloquence of his gestures to the practised charm of his courtship, suggests a golden boy whose world revolves sweetly around his wishes. Everything in his dancing creates that impression, too. Stiefel is a superbly fluent mover, whose steps all seem to be cut from the same expensive, silken cloth. His unusually slender frame makes even the big jumps and turns look as if they require nothing as crude as brute muscle power. It is a hugely enjoyable, coherent performance.
In act two, though, Stiefel seems unable to suggest that the surface virtuosity of his dancing issues from darker, uncontrolled emotions. He acts a state of remorseful passion and terror, but these emotions don't register in his movements. The burst of beaten jumps that climax Albrecht's dance to death have rarely looked sharper or sweeter than on Stiefel's body. What they don't look like is the action of a man whose heart is broken.
The same problem affects his Giselle, Leanne Benjamin. As with Stiefel, her act one is bright with intelligent acting, and throughout the ballet she dances on technically fine form. But her performance never passes into a realm where it looks unwilled. We never see her Giselle as precariously vulnerable or as drifting in from another world.
Although Saturday's performance overall was good rather than great, it did illuminate some interesting details in the ballet, particularly in the smaller roles. Jenny Tattersall's Moyna was wonderfully spiky and vaporous; Alastair Marriott's Hilarion was almost hatefully sincere (a nice contrast to his hilariously queeny Master of the Hunt on Thursday), and Ashley Page was a wickedly bluff, lascivious Duke. This is the kind of stage business that the Royal does better than any other company.
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