By the time Dennis Potter’s astonishing Pennies from Heaven was transfixing
television audiences, Ashley Page’s ballet career was well under way. Having
joined London’s Royal Ballet School in 1976, Page was busy with classes and
rehearsals, immersed in Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev rather than the crooners
of the 1930s.
Yet the TV show, with Bob Hoskins mouthing the bittersweet tunes of pre-1939
dance bands, made a huge impression on the young Page.“I bought the
cassette,” he recalls. “It was with me for a long time.”
Three decades later, Page, the creative director of Scottish Ballet, has
brought the same songs to life as part of the company’s autumn tour.
That is where the connection with Potter’s masterwork ends, however; Page’s
piece has no scheming, adulterous sheet-music salesman driving the
narrative. Instead, it is something much simpler, a charming confection to
sit beside two more conceptual pieces.
Ride the Beast and For MG: The Movie made up two-thirds of the company’s 2007
Edinburgh Festival show. The former, created for Scottish Ballet by the New
York choreographer Stephen Petronio, is wildly physical, with a Radiohead
soundtrack and macramé-meets-flesh costumes.
The latter, Scottish Ballet’s version of the 1991 signature piece by Trisha
Brown, is as minimal as the simple body stockings the dancers wear. Based on
the idea of film directors allowing actors to move in and out of frame, it
has divided audiences and critics.
Into that already intriguing mix, Page is throwing the vintage glamour and
divine decadence of Pennies from Heaven.
“It’s a dance entertainment set to wonderful songs from the 1930s,” explains
Page. “I’ve been aware since I’ve been at Scottish Ballet that we need some
end pieces. We do plenty of challenging work, but we needed something
different to end our mixed programmes, something to send people home with a
lighter heart.”
This does not mean that the company coasts along while Al Bowlly’s melodies do
all the work.
“It looks light and effortless, but it’s fiendishly difficult for the
dancers,” says Page between rehearsals. “They are up there now, heaving and
blowing, trying to recover. If it’s too easy, they find it a bit of a bore.
So we’ve tried to catch the frivolous attitude of the songs while giving
them something to get their teeth into physically.”
Working with his regular design collaborator, Antony McDonald, Page has
summoned up a world balanced on a glittering knife edge.
“The 1930s were a fascinating time. There was the depression, the rise of
Nazism and the looming second world war. It was the decade when the very
rich were at the peak of their sophistication, but at the same time their
way of life was coming to an end. Huge country houses became unsustainable
and you had this upstairs-downstairs split. Fashion was as elegant as it was
going to get. For me, that period sums up mid-century glamour.”
McDonald and Caro Harkness, the head of wardrobe, have taken this as their cue
to create a sumptuous set of costumes. Pennies from Heaven is a series of
vignettes, staged in a shape-shifting hotel lobby, art deco bar and cinema
foyer. Through this space comes a cross-section of society: the very rich in
their sharp tailoring and luscious cocktail gowns, sailors on leave out with
their lady friends. There is also a foxy cigarette girl and a cute bellhop
to look after their every need.
All this means there are immaculate suits and hats for the men. There is also
a touch of outrageous campery, with the male leads called upon to wear
Stetsons, chaps, neckerchiefs and authentic white sailor hats, lovingly
sourced by Harkness on eBay. The raincoats look like traditional beige,
belted mackintoshes, but have extra full skirts to allow the dancers to
move.
For the women, there are the most gorgeous frocks. Harkness puts her hands up
to a shameless rip-off of Keira Knightley’s green column dress, as worn in
the film Atonement, to be worn by Muscovite Vassilissa Levtonova.
Another character, played by French dancer Sophie Laplane in heels, is
“rougher, more slutty”. She channels, according to Page, “Jean Harlow’s
louche delivery, her sensuality.” Her duet with the former Rambert dancer
Paul Liburd is steamy in the extreme.
Page has used Pennies from Heaven to continue his policy of mixing up the
company and moving it out of its comfort zones. “I have brought the
‘Bluebird’ couple” — Adam Blyde and Tomomi Sato, who stole the third act of
the company’s production of The Sleeping Beauty — “back together, and cast
some of the young ones and given them some extraordinarily difficult stuff
to do.”
He is not exaggerating. There are girls who have yet to vote duetting with
more senior male dancers. This, says Page, is all part of his creative
process, of getting to know the dancers and keeping them fresh and,
literally, on their toes.
Out of 60 tracks on that well-worn cassette of Pennies from Heaven, he has
used 16. Everything about them delights Page.
“These songs are perfectly wrought,” he says. “Most of them are three minutes
long, the perfect length for a pop song. The lyrics often use weather as a
metaphor. They seem so cheerful on the surface yet they are bittersweet,
there is often a sadness there.”
With the romantic ballads, Page admits to pinching something of the mood of
the film Brief Encounter. McDonald has taken the weather motifs and woven
them into the visual setting, with film clips on a large screen and sound
effects of rain, wind and waves linking the different songs together.
Together, they hope to make something that amounts to more than the sum of
its parts.
“It has to be more than a series of numbers,” says Page. “That would get a bit
tedious.”
If it all works — and Page’s potentially bonkers decisions have a habit of
turning out well — then Pennies from Heaven could become part of Scottish
Ballet’s repertoire. With so many songs still unused, there is also the
possibility of swapping around and adding in new material to keep it fresh.
The TV series of Pennies from Heaven was seen as revolutionary at the time. It
won awards and launched Hoskins’s acting career. In putting the company’s
envelope-pushing work on hold and creating a lavish, populist crowd-pleaser,
Page is in some ways taking as big a risk as the BBC did with Potter. It is
hard to see this risk not paying off. It has all the makings of one of
Scottish Ballet’s most visually spectacular, technically astounding, pieces
of work.
As the younger members of the company might have it, what’s not to like?
Scottish Ballet’s autumn season opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, on
September 18 and then tours. For more details see www.scottishballet.co.uk
