Director and Choreographer: Ben Duke
Updating and adapting The Tale of Two Cities into a 90-minute dance piece was always going to be a big ask, and choreographer Ben Duke admits as much in the programme notes. Dickens’s 1859 novel about the French Revolution is a sprawling text and the addition of live video, guns and songs only confuses the story further. This is not the best of times.
It starts well, however, with Nina-Morgane Madelaine who plays Luicie Manette, announcing that she is making a documentary about her family and its secrets. It may well be the end of the 18th century, but Madelaine wheels around a camera and projects scenes onto the open roof of Amber Vandenhoeck’s dilapidated house design. There’s comedy when Lucie introduces her parents and brother sat round a table in the house. These early minutes are promising and are reminiscent of Katie Mitchell but with added humour.
Unfortunately, that’s about as good as it gets. The rest is endless exposition about doppelgangers and public executions with a smattering of dance, which does little to move the story forward. Duke’s choreography is interesting, full of jerky movements with facial expressions to match, but there isn’t enough of it, and contrarily when it comes it quickly outstays its welcome, especially in one section where a timer counts down the minutes when one character is hanged by the public mob to the sound of jazz.
The performers do well with the many lines that Duke has given them, particularly Valentina Formenti and and Hannes Langolf who are animated as Lucie’s parents squabbling about the past. John Kendall plays her brother with considerable charm, and best of all is the expressive Temitope Ajose-Cutting but her story remains a subplot despite her claims that the narrative is all about her.
Their hard work and characterisation is wasted and the performers can do nothing, not even Madelaine with her sweet song at the show’s end, to stop this show from becoming turgid, and, at the worst of times, boring.
Runs until 5 March 2022
