Turgenev's Natalya Petrovna is an extreme and unreasonable creation, and although Frederick Ashton muted the character for his ballet version of A Month in the Country, the role remains beyond the dramatic range of most ballerinas. It's fair to say that those who have triumphed as Natalya - Lynn Seymour, Sylvie Guillem - understand what it means to be unreasonable. It goes with the territory.
Darcey Bussell, who made her debut in the role on Saturday, is a reasonable being. Her dancing is beautiful and mannerly, her physical intelligence extraordinary. But she is not a creature of extremes, and has never been comfortable in those polar regions of the spirit that dancers such as Guillem and Tamara Rojo navigate so deftly. Her portrait of Natalya is exquisitely detailed, a lace-work pantomime of fuss and flutter. Her feelings betray themselves in an orgy of self-touching, her fingers stroking longingly at the pale scoop of her throat. When she discovers Vera and Beliaev together, her hurt is palpable, but it's a temporary hurt, a summer shower, and when she slaps Vera it's hard to believe that the incident has roused her to such a pitch of selfish cruelty.
In pure dance terms, Bussell is ravishing, and in her melting line and the soft torsion of her neck and wrists, she is everything that Ashton would have wanted. But she doesn't take Natalya to the grimly despairing place that Turgenev does, and to which Ashton's choreography responds with such empathy. The ballet is about a middle-aged woman coming face to face with the loss of youth and hope; Bussell's Natalya is merely upset that an affair hasn't worked out.
The pianist was the excellent Phillip Gammon, who also gave a memorable account of César Franck's Symphonic Variations. In Les Biches, the Girl in Blue was danced with cool finesse by Mara Galeazzi, who bears a curious resemblance to the ballet's creator, Bronislava Nijinska.
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