Anna Karenina/Eifman Ballet, Coliseum - review

The maverick choreographer Boris Eifman has been running his independent ballet company since Brezhnev was in charge of the Soviet Union and the Kremlin expected to control the arts. Not only that but he started up in Leningrad, a city whose Kirov Ballet was one of the world’s great companies. In those circumstances, you have to shout to make yourself heard.

To borrow the language of Spinal Tap, Eifman is a choreographer whose dials not only go up to 11, they are jammed there. He seems to feel that there is no human emotion whose expression cannot be improved by falling down or balancing someone on your shoulders. In Anna Karenina, the splayed limbs and explosive, tangled lifts are like watching a psychological self-disembowelling. Nina Zmievets’s sultry, death-loving Anna spills all her guilt and neediness onto the stage. She fatalistically poisons one duet with her lover, Oleg Gabyshev’s Vronsky, until eventually her neurotic contortions leave her perched on his head, feet clasped around his neck, like a vulture.

However, there are dances of equally desperate ardency with Oleg Markov’s shirtless, incongruously passionate Karenin, the abandoned husband who surely should be colder and more contained.

The pre-recorded music, mostly culled from Tchaikovsky, contributes to a feeling of relentless cheap emoting, studded with moments of real genius. Anna’s premonition of her death — circled by her son’s model train — is chillingly economical, as is the aftermath of her eventual suicide. The body that was so full of tormenting life gets wheeled out face down — not even a corpse, just a waste disposal issue.

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