Watching the Eifman Ballet's Tchaikovsky, you can easily imagine its subject feeling hounded in his grave. Aside from the casual mauling of his music (a tinny compilation of greatest hits), this portrayal of Tchaikovsky's traumatised sexual and creative life is as histrionic as anything Ken Russell fantasised in The Music Lovers. The composer is plagued by characters from his most famous ballet scores as he battles with his homosexuality and fights to preserve the integrity of his music. This Tchaikovsky, as danced by Konstantin Matulevski with a quivering lip and anguished gaze, is not the brilliant musician, but a character who is nine parts torment, one part genius.
Yet Boris Eifman's version of the composer's life does build its own peculiar, flamboyant logic. On the surface, his plot progresses straightforwardly through the emotional points in Tchaikovsky's life: his troubled dependence on his domineering patron Countess Von Meck, his even more troubled attempts at loving a woman, his struggle with depression and desire for death. The heart of the story, by contrast, is articulated through the characters and symbolism of 19th-century ballet, its images spun wilder and wilder as Eifman plays with good and evil roles, the reason and madness, the tension between desire and illusion.
In Tchaikovsky, the result is a hallucinatory rewrite of familiar ballet moments and a teasing speculation on how the composer might have fantasised about his own creations. When we see him introduced to the beautiful man who is both his lover and his gay alter ego, the moment hangs, intriguingly, as either a blessing or a curse bestowed by the bad Fairy Carabosse. When a flock of tutu-clad swans cluster around Tchaikovsky, we do not know if he is acting the role of suffering Odette or if he is Siegfried trying to save her. And when he dies (by poison or suicide) in a grand, mourning apotheosis, we do not know whether this is meant as the justification of Tchaikovsky's romanticism or its defeat.
This is a work full of violent crisis and colour. Given the company's acting style - heavy-duty shoulder-heaving and eyebrow-knitting - it could seem violently corny. But, as with his ballet Red Giselle, Eifman does not pause for breath in the telling of its story. His ideas pour out of the dancers' bodies and from the stage in an unstoppable flood. If some of those ideas are murky and some weepily lachrymose, others are so bold or spectacular that the cumulative effect is hard to resist.
