Cannot be unseen: The Unknown Soldier at the ROH
The Unknown Soldier
The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House
Stalls D7, general rehearsal
19 November 2018
ROH page
Various judgements presented themselves to me during the first two thirds of Alastair Marriott’s new ballet The Unknown Soldier. I thought: the music, newly composed by Dario Marianelli, is in the Minkus rather than the Stravinsky tradition – perfectly reasonable to dance to, not something to listen to. I thought: the stage design by Es Devlin is magnificent, engrossing, intelligent and emotionally engaging, perhaps rather more so than the choreography. I thought: the ballet makes me think of the First World War, and of the waste it made of human life, and what it would be like if most of the men in my life went away never to return – but is this because the ballet is good or because it has the good sense to pick a subject already tragic? I thought: as in Connectome Marriott’s choreography is perfectly fluid but I am uncertain whether it communicates anything beyond neat fluidity. I thought: Yasmine Naghdi is a beautiful dancer, but she is no Francesca Hayward. I thought: ballet is very obviously an absurdly strenuous physical feat; why then has Marriott made ballet and military drills seem so incongruous? I thought: why are the uniforms transparent?
And then the final ten minutes happened. With, I would argue, insufficient preparation, the ballet veers from the loss of war into an imagining of life after death. I think this is a transition that would be difficult to pull off even in the most ameliorative circumstances. Marriott does not create for himself such circumstances. For him, life after death is represented by Matthew Ball all but naked, swishing around through some wishy-washy dance moves. More than this: it is in fact a whole host of all-but-naked Royal Ballet men swishing around, bathed in a golden light that picks out the impressiveness of their abs, and the exploitation of their all-but-nakedness.
I’m very happy to ogle male beauty, but the circumstances must be right for me to feel happy in my ogling rather than weird. A WWI ballet, and a nakedness that is all but absolute, do not create those circumstances. This final third transforms the ballet from a harmless, well-meant attempt to respond to the centenary of armistice to something that is exploitative, weird and frankly ridiculous, and something that try as I might I can’t unsee.
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