Jazz Age Ballet Leaves Audience In A Flap

It’s 10 years since Northern Ballet’s The Great Gatsby premiered and, all these years on, David Nixon’s masterpiece is as fresh as the Long Island air from which Scott C Fitzgerald took his inspiration for The Great American Novel.

Set on the peripheries of 1920’s New York, the story tells the tale of soldier turned corrupt businessman, Jay Gatsby, and his undying but unrequited love for socialite Daisy Buchanan.Evocative of the Jazz Age Nixon’s ballet uses expansive, clean sets that serve to highlight the dancing whilst promoting a sense of imagination of where you are and what you might be part of.

It is about the American dream, the imperialism of Calvin Coolidge’s 1920’s USA, the clash between the nouveau riche and America’s so-called ‘old’ money. It is about love, tragedy and loss.

And what an inspired choice for Northern Ballet all those years ago. This two-hour production with its stunning sets, evocative lighting, sharp suits and Chanel inspired flapper dresses, somehow encapsulates that period of glamour and crime when J Edgar Hoover was securing his position within the FBI, and Al Capone was laying the foundations of his criminal empire in Chicago.

This time it was Joseph Taylor’s turn to play the role of Gatsby – a strong and powerful performance – but I also found my eye drawn to the ‘narrator’ of the piece, Nick Carraway, played by Sean Bates who, I’m sure, must have springs in his tights!

He dances so effortlessly and I have watched a number of his performances over the years and never failed to have been impressed.

Dominique Larose was in full flight as Daisy Buchanan with the whisp-like Rachael Gillespie as Young Daisy. Myrtle ‘the mistress’ Wilson was danced by Amber Lewis who gave a strong performance opposite her ‘affair’ - Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, danced with powerful, hypocritical arrogance by Gavin McCaig.

The ballet score, developed in conjunction with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett just before he died, draws on the composer’s diverse expertise in four disciplines – symphonic work, film music, jazz and popular song.

And, for an Englishman, his work was so beautifully American, somewhere between George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Scott Joplin, with a hint of jazz and the Roaring Twenties to top it off.

NBT now has a wonderful cannon of work from Dracula to The Nutcracker, Casanova to Beauty & the Beast, which will make another welcome return soon. As much as its reputation soared under Nixon’s tenure, so did the quality of its ideas and number of full-length productions.

David Nixon may have left the company a couple of years back – he is now rightly holder of both the OBE and CBE – but his spirit lives on in this wonderful ballet and those other full length productions he left behind after 20 years in the Artistic Director’s chair.

Well worth your ticket money.