Northern Ballet Theatre are celebrating their 40th birthday with a programme of one-act works - a rare departure from their normal diet of full-length story ballets. In principle, it's a welcome contrast, but the choice of works sends out a frustratingly muted message about the company's identity and aspirations.
The main event is a revival of A Simple Man, Gillian Lynne's homage to the life and work of painter LS Lowry. The ballet is sentimentally linked to the company, its title role having been created by former director Christopher Gable, and in some ways it's an appealing work. Tim Goodchild's designs capture the drab light of Lowry's canvases, as well as the lively pathos of those who inhabit them. Lynne's choreography is colourfully theatrical and Darren Goldsmith sweetly evokes the repressed turbulence of the artist's inner life. But this doesn't quite add up to a ballet. Lynne develops the work in a succession of scenes and, by failing to link them within a choreographic arc, the structure feels more like a musical. At critical moments, you keep expecting the dancers to launch into song.
There's a lack of substance, too, in Mark Godden's Angels in the Architecture, set to Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. This is lovely to look at, the choreography crafted in clean, glowing lines, but its vision of the Shaker people, from whom it takes inspiration, goes little deeper than chairs and brooms woven into the piece as props, along with token motifs of piety.
David Nixon's As Time Goes By is even more superficial. The stage is converted to a cabaret, the dancers are in evening clothes, yet Nixon's choreo-graphy preens through its accompanying songs oblivious to their lyrics and style. It takes more than a veneer of smoky glamour to create a jazz ballet.
