After Ridley Scott's glossy digital scenery in Gladiator, Houston Ballet returns the land of the Caesars to a much more old-fashioned, theatrical tradition. Cleopatra (created last year) comes from the stable of big, plush story ballets with which director/ choreographer Ben Stevenson has made Houston's name. With the help of designers Thomas Boyd and Judanna Lynn and composer John Lanchbery it presses all the available buttons of classical dance theatre to create a work cosily tucked between the 19th and 20th centuries.
Set against a gilded, painterly backdrop, the ballet boasts an array of expensive, crowd-pleasing effects, the most spectacular being Cleopatra's diva-style entrance when she appears to glide on stage in a jewelled barge. The choreography is set to an arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov's concert and operatic music, giving it a period patina circa 1900. It aims for the scale of Spartacus, and the oriental opulence of La Bayadère or Scheherazade. Though the cast isn't huge, Stevenson maximises the athleticism of Houston's dancers with spacious moves, inflected in the Egyptian scenes with flattened, hieratic poses and in the Roman scenes with a disputative political energy.
There's little risk or novelty, but the movement services the story with purposeful clarity. The Roman senators dance with a blunt, muscular aggression, in contrast to the introvert homoerotic duets of Ptolemy and Pothinius as they plot against Cleopatra. Pothinius (Nicholas Leschke ) dominates the craven, diminutive Ptolemy (Mauricio Canete) in a seesawing game of sex and power.
Cleopatra was created, however, as a ballerina vehicle, specifically for Houston's home-grown star, Lauren Anderson. Much has been made of Anderson's rarity as a black ballerina - and it's undeniable that her skin colour serves the ballet well. But it's her dramatic and technical gifts that are the real issue. Anderson is a tall, rangy dancer who combines a dynamic attack with musical elegance. She has a good instinct for Cleopatra's capricious nature, motivated by insolent sexuality and by queenly ambition. She is badly hampered, though, by Stevenson's oddly reticent choreography in her love duets with Caesar and Marc Antony, which fail to elevate her to the grand heroine mode that the format of the ballet requires. Cleopatra is one of the most famous, and fatal, female lovers in history, yet this role doesn't take her to any extremes of eroticism, passion, tenderness or loss.
The work is without question an exercise in ballet populism and as such is professionally crafted with lots of dancing and energy. What will make it seem parochial to many London fans is less the fact that it's a stylistic throwback than its failure to go for broke in delivering a real old-fashioned love story.
In rep until Saturday. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
