My sister-in-law is not a ballet fan, but last week she went to a ballet at the Acropolis. It happened to be Don Quixote. “No idea what’s going on,” she texted. “But it’s fun.”
That’s the thing about Don Quixote. Virtually every company in the world has its own version of this frou-frou of a classic, first choreographed for the Bolshoi by Marius Petipa in 1869, much revised by Alexsander Gorsky in 1900, and interpreted by various choreographers in a multiplicity of stagings ever since.
Whatever they do, it never quite makes sense. There’s a slim story about a barber called Basilio and his high-spirited love Kitri. There are matadors and street dancers, tradesmen, serving girls and beggars, and a visionary Queen of the Dryads. Then there’s Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, and his sidekick Sancho Panza stealing chickens. Any resemblance to Cervantes’s novel is entirely accidental.
In staging his version for the Royal Ballet, Carlos Acosta, who was once a high-jumping and charming Basilio, has taken the wise decision to increase the comedy and concentrate on the dancing. The production, designed in bright pastels by Tim Hatley, has sharpened and deepened since it first appeared in 2013, with the Royal Ballet’s dramatic instincts giving the street scenes light, shade and carefully etched movement.
Christopher Saunders lends Don Quixote a baffled dignity that helps to anchor the mayhem around him, while Philip Mosley actually makes Panza likable rather than irritating, a considerable achievement. Many casts are lined up, but the opening night brought Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov and they were sensational.
The flashy pyrotechnics – the leaps, the spins – hold no terrors for them, but it is their pleasure in performing that lights up the stage. They are flirty and full of joy, humanising the couple, colouring in their broad outlines. Don Quixote still doesn’t make much sense, but it’s like a shock of sunshine, lightening the autumn.
