Mary Skeaping made a career out of Giselle, mounting six productions during her lifetime, each of which, she believed, took her closer to the heart of the Romantic classic. She never aimed for an exact reconstruction of the original. Yet in her final production (initially mounted for ENB in 1972) Skeaping went far enough back to raise the difficult questions about authentic and modern stagings.
There is no doubt that this Giselle conjures vivid, touching spirits from the past. Stylistically it has the delicate texture of a pressed flower, the dancers' arms kept soft and low, their heads modestly averted, their jumps feathery and light. The mime sections too have an old fashioned elaborateness - with extra story-telling detail (Giselle quaintly gestures to her friends that they should stop stripping the grapes from the vines and dance with her) as well as more urgent dramatic resonance (death stalks with Gothic grandeur through Berthe's miming of the curse of the wilis, and is evoked as a far more potent threat to the watching men).
ENB's dancers (overseen by Beryl Grey) have been expertly schooled for this revival, with Elena Glurdjidze outstanding as the queen of the wilis. But audiences familiar with the more red-blooded production staged by The Royal might find Skeaping's Giselle short on drama. The logic of her stage business, her grouping of the dancers has more to do with formal composition than action, which means that some of the big psychological moments get lost. Most critically of all the central relationship between Giselle and Albrecht fails to grip.
This is partly the fault of the two principals Daria Klimentova and Dmitri Gruzdyev, for while both are technically fine, neither are instinctive actors. She doesn't make us feel the hectic, dangerous pulse of Giselle's passion, he doesn't measure the depth of Albrecht's romantic self delusion. But the two dancers aren't helped by the fact that Skeaping has given their roles less light and shade than in most productions, and they simply have less material from which to imagine their characters. This production communicates a lot of love - but it's not the kind of emotion that unites lovers beyond the grave. It's the love a company feels towards a precious classic.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0238 071 1811. At Bristol Hippodrome from Tuesday. Box office: 0870 160 2832.
