Why not an Elizabeth-and-Mary Stuart ballet?, And who should be in it? Options

[bart]

Today's NY Times has a glowing review of a new production of Schiller's Mary Stuart, with Janet McTeer as Elizabeth I and Harriet Walter as Mary Queen of Scots. It's a London transplant, produced by the Donmar Warehouse.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/the...20mary.html?hpw

Wouldn't this story make a wonderful ballet? Think of the contrasting lives of Vanessa Redgrave (Mary) / Glenda Jackson (Elizabeth) -- and their confrontations (though the two women actually never met). It's classic and fairly well-known. That needs that you don't need to fill it with all sorts of plot exposition. It COULD be an elaborate story ballet. But it could also be something quite condensed. You would need powerful and quite different dramatic ballerinas.

So: whom would you cast as Elizabeth? whom as Mary? And, for the adventurous, how about a choreographer?

I can't think of contemporary dramatic ballerinas, but -- if we could move back to the past -- I think that John Cranko could have done something with Marcia Haydee (Mary) and Nora Kaye (Elizabeth) -- though they're from different generations. Jose Limon, of course. And Antony Tudor. Are there ANY choreographers and ballerinas who could carry this off today?

[Hans]

I would love to see this done. A ballet about mature, powerful women. I would like to see it done as an elaborate story ballet because I think those sell better and are seen by a wider audience. Perhaps with choreography by Ratmansky.

[Leigh Witchel]

Martha Graham's section of Episodes told the story of Elizabeth and Mary - in contrast to Balanchine's non-narrative dances to atonal music.

[papeetepatrick]

Martha Graham's section of Episodes told the story of Elizabeth and Mary - in contrast to Balanchine's non-narrative dances to atonal music.

Yes, and Graham's Notebooks make this sound absolutely fascinating. The tennis game alone is totally inspired, genius. Would love to see the company revive this. I believe rg (or someone else, maybe miliosr) said that some of this had been lost, forgotten, even though you can definitely tell a lot from the notes, which are especially copious for this piece, if I remember correctly.

[Hans]

Yes, but I think there still ought to be a ballet about it.

[Mashinka]

Peter Darrell did a Mary Queen of Scots for Scottish Ballet, I think late 70's or early 80's, does anyone remember more details?

[bart]

A tennis match seems a great symbolic device, and I would love to have been able to see the Graham. Tennis has elements of the courtly and the vicious.

One of the aspects of the Donmar production that is fascinating has to do with the way the 2 queens are visually abstracted out of their male/politico surroundings. There is a visual immediacy to the costuming.

They are “female kings,” as Peter Oswald’s juicy new adaptation of Schiller’s German text has it, in a land where men are used to being governed only by men. This production, designed by Anthony Ward, ingeniously emphasizes the disparity by having only the female cast members in period Elizabethan costumes. The men wear latter-day Westminster business suits, and the expert actors inside them convey all the thorny ambivalence of having to bow to sweeping skirts.

This would work very well in dance, I think.

But don't forget ... how about the casting?!? ABT's Gillian Murphy (after a few classes at the Acting Studio) for Elizabeth? Veronika Part for Mary? Does NYCB have anyone? I'll bet the Bolshoi does.

[richard53dog]

But don't forget ... how about the casting?!? ABT's Gillian Murphy (after a few classes at the Acting Studio) for Elizabeth? Veronika Part for Mary? Does NYCB have anyone? I'll bet the Bolshoi does.

Murphy , with her coloring, would be a good visual match for Elizabeth. Mary needs something more fictional as Mary was never a great beauty and was in pretty poor health by the end of her life so a little romanticizing may be in order.

Donizetti made a successful opera, Maria Stuarda, based on the Schiller. The highlight is perhaps the confrontation between the two queens, something that never happened in real life. But for myself, I love Maria's final scene. It's very elegiac, very typical of Donizetti's Romantic style.


Not straying too far in history I remember that Wheeldon created an interesting piece , VIII, based on Henry, Katharine, and Anne Boleyn.

[papeetepatrick]

I think I have a neurotic problem with this story, because of what I've read about the execution. It was unnecessarily cruel even for beheadings, wasn't it? Along these lines, in the last year, I read that the great (and wonderfully eccentric) Dame Edith Evans said in Bryan Forbes's bio 'Edith Evans: Ned's Girl', that she wasn't really sure she liked the idea of an afterlife when all was said and done, because 'you might have to meet so many unpleasant people--like Queen Elizabeth.' It sounds dotty, but that queen does come across as monumentally admirable, and thoroughly hateful. She and her father had definitely mastered the refinements of beheading, and I wouldn't like to meet them either! (IMG:http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif) Elizabeth I TOO rational...or something really, really overdone, I hate her too...I think the scaffold is onstage, elevated, all or most of the time in Graham's piece. It's just too hard not to keep from thinking only about that part for me. Maybe Ashley Bouder as Elizabeth, Nina Ananiashvili or Big Red kondoureva as Mary Stuart, I don't care that much about somebody lookiing like Elizabeth, I think she's so ugly anyway, not a feminine bone in her body. Maybe Aurelie Dupont or somebody else French for Mary, since she loved to 'be French' whether or not in France, imprisoned or not as well.

Doesn't strike me as a subject that would work as well as a ballet, but it might. I do like the costuming in the new production with different periods for the women and men. That seems to me very sly and striking. I wonder if it's the first time such a device has been used, but it's a lot more interesting than most period things put in 'present-day settings', etc.

[Mel Johnson]

The Tudors are always good copy for drama; sometimes they seem to be comporting themselves as if for posterity.

[dirac]

Doesn't strike me as a subject that would work as well as a ballet, but it might. I do like the costuming in the new production with different periods for the women and men. That seems to me very sly and striking. I wonder if it's the first time such a device has been used, but it's a lot more interesting than most period things put in 'present-day settings', etc.

I don’t see it as a conventional narrative ballet, either. Too many scenes with too many in-laws, as Balanchine might say, and how would you stage the (fictional) meeting with Elizabeth and Mary? (You can try dramatizing the story without having the two queens meet, as Robert Bolt did in ‘Vivat!Vivat Regina!’ but it didn’t work for him and I don’t think anyone else would be able to manage it better.) It sounds inherently campy to me, but I could be wrong, of course.

It was unnecessarily cruel even for beheadings, wasn't it?

It has been suggested that Mary’s beheading, like Essex’s, was done a little crudely in order to set an example, but I doubt Elizabeth had anything to do with that. Elizabeth preserved Mary’s life for years when everyone else in the government was pressing for her execution and in spite of the fact that Mary plotted against her whenever an opportunity presented itself. Her father and grandfather would have taken much less time about it and been far less scrupulous about their evidentiary requirements. Mary's execution did have a special black comedy touch, when her head was lifted by its hair for display and separated from her wig, causing the head to drop and roll around on the ground.

Martha Graham's section of Episodes told the story of Elizabeth and Mary - in contrast to Balanchine's non-narrative dances to atonal music.

Graham revived it as an independent ballet later on. Arlene Croce compared and contrasted the two in Afterimages, I believe. I agree with bart, the tennis game is an inspired idea, although it wouldn’t work for ballet.

[papeetepatrick]

the tennis game is an inspired idea, although it wouldn’t work for ballet.

There's a photo of Martha and Sallie Wilson with the racquets in 'Episodes' in the Notebooks. They are more like badminton racquets. Was this 'real tennis'? I just found this, which I suppose could be used as a Prelude, given the affinity of tennis for Tudor executionery: "tt is believed that his second wife Anne Boleyn was watching a game of real tennis when she was arrested and that Henry was playing tennis when news was brought to him of her execution." This is just lifted from wiki, but I think it possible Martha got the idea from these events, though that's just a wild guess.

[Mel Johnson]

The tennis of the sixteenth century was most often court tennis, which is real, but a rather strange game combining tennis, squash, and pinball!

[leonid]

The tennis of the sixteenth century was most often court tennis, which is real, but a rather strange game combining tennis, squash, and pinball!

Real tennis is still played in England and Australia and there are also courts in the USA where it is played.

[bart]

I imagine that this could be done in many ways. The least interesting to me would be something like Mayerling, a complex historical soap opera filled with a multiplicity of characters and issues. You odn't need the Guises or Cecil or Walsingham pr Leicester or Darnley or Bothwell or John Knox or John Stuart or the fifth Earl from the Left.

I see it as a story that can be simplified and stylized, abstracted out of history as it were, by taking advantage of the familarity of the characters and the general story. "MARYANDELIZABETH" are, in a way, locked together in an unbreakable dramatic embrace that makes them versions of a single character.

I can imagine two distinct corps of dancers: Elizabeth with her male countiers and counsellors; Mary with hers. Each moves in its own style. They interweave and even interact, when necessary, without directdly touching one another. I'd make two exceptions:
-- the confrontation scene, however you depict it; and
-- the scene of Mary's execution, with Elizabeth's imagination of it occurring on stage at the same time (the theatrical equivalent of a film director's use of cross-cutting).

However we imagine it, we'll still need casting. So ... whom do you like for Elizabeth and Mary?