Spring Passions/Birmingham Royal Ballet, Coliseum - review

Frederick Ashton’s Daphnis and Chloë, the first ballet in this seasonal double bill, is a pastoral Greek reverie spiced up by kidnap, bondage, gauze-draped nymphs, near-rape and a (consensual) leg-twanging orgasm experienced by Ambra Vallo’s bad girl, Lykanion, much to the surprise of Iain Mackay’s hero Daphnis, who induces it.

His real love, Chloë, is taken by pirates later but, on the point of being ravished, gets rescued by Pan — a god not normally famed for his disinterested patronage of young, pretty virgins.

With its folky communal dancing, bright colours and sun-etched landscapes by artist John Craxton, it is as if Rosemary’s Baby had been restaged for a family audience by the folks behind Mamma Mia! Although entertaining in many of its parts, there are sections where it even makes Ravel’s score sound kitsch by association.

The second Ashton contribution, The Two Pigeons, is an incomparably greater ballet to a lesser piece of music, by André Messager. From the moment the curtain goes up on designer Jacques Dupont’s garret, with its window that would be the envy of Versailles, we are promised a world of fantasy that is triumphantly delivered by Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Using the minutia of everyday movements, such as the stretch of an artist’s model relieving her cramp or the chest-pumping strut of a pigeon, Ashton creates a poetry of trifles as the real language of intimacy. Nao Sakuma has the sort of physical pathos and comic timing to make you wish that The Artist were not a one-off, and silent films would come back into fashion. The way her deep ballerina’s shoulders creep up her neck as if to console her every time she gets rebuffed is Chaplinesque.

Robert Parker’s young artist is charmed but infuriated by her, and throws himself against the confines of the relationship with growing impatience until he runs off in disastrous pursuit of a gypsy (Elisha Willis showing her versatility as well as her stamina after dancing Chloë).

From the wildness of the gypsy camp to a reconciliation in which the couple seem, piece by piece, to mend each other, Ashton’s invention never flags. It is hard to think of a wrong note or an unnecessary step in this ballet, or in BRB’s production of it.

Ends tonight (0871 911 0200, eno.org)