It was in 1975 that Lindsay Kemp created his gothic, gaudy tribute to old Hollywood, The Parade's Gone By. And, as Rambert's revival makes clear, it has become more than just an exhumation of the ghosts of old movies. It has also become a period piece about the 1970s. As today's twenty-something dancers play at being Rudolf Valentino, Marlene Dietrich and Mary Pickford, they seem to be just as busy evoking the decade of glam-rock.
The scenario is classic Kemp: a deranged old film director makes movies in his head using a chaotically mangled cast of dead stars. Valentino flirts with Dietrich, who is killed off by a jealous starlet in a death scene of rococo hamminess. Pickford plays Beauty to a pantomime Beast but, just as she finds her Prince, is set upon by a rampaging Bela Lugosi Dracula.
The material lends itself naturally to Kempian excesses: deliriously bad jokes, heroic cliches, shameless cribbing. But the best parts are not so much Hollywood as Petipa, with Kemp sending Beauty and the Beast through a mad 19th-century ballet of his own devising. Its cast of demented fairies, limp-wristed courtiers and a blissfully dim-witted blond-rinsed Prince are a timely reminder that Kemp was doing camp classics years before those great transvestite parodists, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, got around to the genre.
However, what's also classic Kemp are the occasional sketchy longueurs. His own company have always been adept at filling out the spaces in his material with high voltage camping and big emotions, but the Rambert dancers seem a little young and serious to contribute their own nonsense. Even Christopher Bruce as the director seems muted. Still, another few weeks and they should loosen into the silliness of it all. Parade may end up being the huge crowd-pleaser it was in the 1970s.
At Sadler's Wells, London EC1, May 14-25. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
