Swan Lake is nothing, if not magical. That magic exists both in the enchantment of Odette by the evil Baron Von Rothbart and in the lakeside spectacle of swans dancing in the moonlight. So, it was a pity that the latter magic was spoilt by vocal interruptions from the audience during the first of the ‘white’ acts, although it has become the second scene of Act 1 in this new, reduced, restaging for the State Ballet of Georgia by its director Nina Ananiashvili and Alexei Fadeechev.
I’m all in favour of relaxed performances, where audiences can cry out their pleasure during the show, but this was not such an event and having an audience member loudly shouting during the first act was an unfortunate disturbance that led to another loudly yelling “shut up”! Until 2024, the Georgian State Ballet had not visited London in its distinguished 175-year history, and it was a pity that this quick return to the London Coliseum had such an inauspicious start.
It was one of a series of unfortunate events that detracted from the magic. The frontcloth, which should have shielded the set transitions between scenes was not large enough to cover the proscenium and one could see people and set movements that should not have been seen. This visual interruption was not as bad as the mechanical noise of those clunky transitions, which was considerable.
Poor lighting cues also suggested a hasty ‘get-in’ to the theatre with, for example, a dancer executing a jeté from a bright spot but landing in semi-darkness. When the popular dance of the four cygnets came to the front of the stage, the little swans were well lit, but when retreating upstage their illumination was scant. An apparent lack of sufficient rehearsal on this stage also led to some bumps and fluffs in the dancing.
All of this was a great shame because the production was an interesting edit on tradition, achieving perhaps the least-long version of a full-length Swan Lake that I have yet seen, and the dancers were generally terrific. The corps de ballet was exceptional and the traditional Act 4 Lakeside scene (here the second scene of Act 2) was especially delightful. The three big swans in this production (Tata Jashi, Salome Iarajuli and Anastasiia Miliachenko) wear black tutus, perhaps prefacing the appearance of Odile.
The opening night leads were identical to those at the London premiere of that different Swan Lake production in 2024. In the twin role as Odette/Odile, Nino Samadashvili exhibited gorgeous port de bras and an elegance of movement that seemed to defy time, working in superb harmony with the tempo of the borrowed Royal Ballet Sinfonia under the direction of the charismatic Georgian conductor, Levan Jagaev.
Samadashvili’s performance as Odette rose above the challenge of the vocal interruptions and was, at times, satisfyingly mesmerising but Odile was more of a challenge. A poor start threw her off balance in the coda’s 32 fouettés and she just managed to squeeze out 24 with some haphazard travelling across the stage. The enchantment of this black swan pas de deux is self-interrupted by the habit of regularly asking the audience for applause.
Returning as Siegfried, Oleg Ligai has a height that provides for an imposing prince, head and shoulders above the other menfolk, and an expression that makes him seem diffident. He continues the tradition of Georgian virtuosity with soaring jumps, his jetés have a special added upward thrust at the end of the trajectory, and the central core of his pirouettes provides for a perfect balance throughout the spinning. Since he and Samadashvili have clearly been partnering for a while, I was disappointed with their chemistry, which made the love-at-first-sight aspect difficult to believe, but may have been a consequence of the off-stage interruptions.
A third returnee from the 2024 opening night was Marcelo Soares as Rothbart, a pantomime villain rather than pure evil, with a wingspan longer than a jet aeroplane, but easily ripped off by Siegfried in the happy ending. One small quirk in this production is that the ending frees not only Odette from her swan tutu but also the friends that were captured by Rothbart alongside her.
Masaki Goto was an enthusiastic and virtuoso Benno. His pas de trois with Ulrike (Mariam Eloshvili) and Adeline (Tomone Kagawa) annoyingly became a pas de quatre when Siegfried joined to provide for a more downbeat ending than is the norm. I was very taken with the charisma of Elene Gaganidze in an excellent Mazurka and of the phenomenal flexibility of the dancers in the Spanish dance.
This new production is a fine, traditional interpretation of Swan Lake and I am sure that the performances for the remainder of this brief season will be significantly improved without the annoyances that were experienced on this opening night.
