Review by Simon Jenner, May 3rd 2025
“A piece for orchestra without music” said Maurice Ravel condemning his famous Bolero, written for Ida Rubinstein’s dance company. But what happens if, like Bolero, something’s going round and round in your head? Especially when you’re undergoing a life—or-death cranial operation in December 1937: one that might end that pressure on your brain that’s stopped you composing for five years. Tim Coakley In Search of the Dance arrives at the The Lantern Theatre, directed by Petina Hapgood and choreographed by Yanaelle Ritter till May 4th.
Micky Knighton and Jenny Delilisle. Photo Credit: Peter Willliams
This is a piece that, if you know Ravel’s life, will add sidelights. If you don’t you’ll be in for dark delights and the further enigma of Ravel still a little… unravelled. If you know Nye, about to be revived at the National, you’ll also know the form this takes.
The swirl of friends and foes and indeed spectral forces (Left Brain, Right Brain, Three Ideas and Masked Figure) swirl in a wholly unchronological dance themselves, where figures 30 years from each other jostle at the same time. We’re visited too by ghosts like Wagner and new kids on the block like Jean-Paul Sartre – who was only 32 when Ravel died.
We begin with the multi-roling cast of five surrounding Julian Howard McDowell, as he enacts a twinkling, reticent and occasionally slightly irritated Maurice Ravel, girt about with his dreams and demons. Micky Knighton and Jenny Delisle first apparate as two bloodstained surgeons discussing the operation on the composer. And what to do next.
Knighton’s next up as Director of the Conservatoire Theodore Dubois, a decent but hidebound composer who’s blocked Ravel from getting the prestigious Prix de Rome, which everyone from Berlioz (after five attempts) to Debussy has secured. Knighton’s suave Alpha-male performances also follow with flickers of the wholly asynchronous events that follow. Safter the irascible Dubois, thre’s a friend, Clive, James Joyce with his hallucinated new novel, Debussy and Wagner “You’ll never eb as great as me, give up” and friends like Calvocoressi, and the first Idea of three that come forth as stands of Ravel’s mind: and the third has it.
Summer Tewksbury. Photo Credit: Peter Willliams
Delisle after Dr Florence invests characters with a memorable glow or a wink: a raunchy Anita, Madame of the Brothel where Ravel researches, Gertrude stein briefly and more floridly Ida Rubinstein who wants that dance. And finally, Ravel’s Mother: the one woman he loved.
Simon Wiltshire’s great part is the God Pan, rampant in Daphnis and Chloe, the latter of whom he rescues in the ballet and restores to her lover. All credit to the unnamed costume-maker and the clear set here. As well as an anxious Neighbour, Sartre and delightfully (a bit like Pan) a tu-tu get-up as Tchaikowsky being his own Sugar Plum Fairy, Wiltshire takes joy in the wonderfully swung camp, hinted at in his early role as Paul Sordes, leader of Les Apaches, a late 19th-early 20th century artistic group ravel belonged to: her stretched imaginatively to the 1930s.
There’s more fine work from Summer Tewksbury, fresh from directing a concurrent musical Joan, at The Actors. Tewksbury is often mesmerising. As the imaginative twinkling Right Brain, a sinister Masked Figure, a slinky Call Girl, Waitress, intellectual Girl in the Park avoiding the advances of Pan she brings presence to small roles. Ultimately as one of the Bolero dancers, Tewksbury burns magnificently into a final collapse.
Jenny Deslisle. Photo Credit: Peter Willliams
Summer Tewksbury and Julian Howard McDowell. Photo Credit: Peter Willliams
Her partner in this is Filipe Goncalves Ribeiro, as fine a dancer and Tewksbury’s companion too as Left Brain, a Second Idea, an idea as Two Left Feet, Picasso, and two more interesting roles: the great modernist pianist and fellow Apache Ricardo Vines: the interpreter of Debussy and Ravel and whose recordings are still references. And as Stravinsky Ribeiro cowled and sneering quietly, phases in a subtle vignette as the man who both admired and just occasionally undermined Ravel. None of this “I’m better” but something more curious. Stravinsky’s Conversations with Robert Craft reveal more.
There’s great lines too. As the Brains tell him, if he’s 90% water he’s basically an anxious cucumber. This is an absorbing six-hander and one lending many small insights on the composer. It’s a pity Collette and the great pianist Marguerite Long weren’t recruited, but the field’s taken up with a swirl of characters that might prove, to anyone who doesn’t know the composer’s biography at all, rather too much. Some figures like Sartre and Wagner weren’t in Ravel’s orbit at all. And Debussy, rather than Ravel, was locked into an agon with Wagner. Others like Joyce by hearsay only, and the same with Stein. The actors manage to inhabit all of these characters, investing life and more into shadowy presences. It’s reading the Left Bank and Paris by lightning. Ravel however is a more sensitive lightning-rod, and Stravinsky would probably suit the sheer wight pressed upon him. But of course it was ravel who underwent that life-changing operation.
Less febrile swirl, and a little more concentration of character, would transform this superbly-conceived and acted work. Tim Coakley has a potential minor masterpiece on his hands, as he searches for that perfect crashed chord.
Tech Erin Buckeridge and The Lantern Theatre.
Micky Knighton, Simon Wiltshire, Filipe Goncalves Ribeiro, Julian Howard McDowell. Photo Credit: Peter Willliams
