![Marcelino Sambé, Lauren Cuthbertson and (left) Matthew Ball in The Cellist](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/dance/2020/02/18/TELEMMGLPICT000224873007_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqQMWrmMmghMdb3fqmJNBNxaGrS5oTFXWoWC0m28sWXAw.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The Cellist, Dances at a Gathering, Royal Ballet, review: a heartbreaking love letter to Jacqueline du Pré and the magic of music
![Marcelino Sambé, Lauren Cuthbertson and (left) Matthew Ball in The Cellist](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/dance/2020/02/18/TELEMMGLPICT000224873007_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqQMWrmMmghMdb3fqmJNBNxaGrS5oTFXWoWC0m28sWXAw.jpeg?imwidth=680)
All too often, new dance works look fantastic on paper, only to add up to nothing in practice. Cathy Marston’s work is the exact opposite. With her creations, read her plans beforehand and you’d often be forgiven for muttering a Sgt Wilson-esque “Do you think that’s wise?” But then the finished production reaches the stage, only to take wing like some magnificent bird.
Magical, supremely romantic (Romantic, even), and stirring right from the start, The Cellist – co-created with dramaturg Edward Kemp – is a supreme case in point. A many-sided love story and love letter, it sets itself the daunting brief of telling, in movement, the tragic story of the great cellist Jacqueline du Pré: a star in her twenties, married to the great pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim at 22, but forced by multiple sclerosis to abandon the concert hall at 28, and dead at 42.
What’s more – building on an idea in her 2017 adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons for the Royal Danish Ballet – she has a dancer, Marcelino Sambé, actually (in the dramatic sense) “play” du Pré’s beloved Stradivarius as a living, breathing, sentient character, while simultaneously also incarnating something far less tangible: music itself, its indestructible wonder, its unique ability to bring people together.
A neoclassicist with a strong dance-theatrical bent, Marston never lets accuracy get in the way of truth. With the corps de ballet playing not only audience members and so on, but also everything from a record-player to household furniture, the stage constantly pulsates with life, and the hour-long piece (a substantial run time that it very much needs) mostly zips by with tremendous speed, almost like an incredibly detailed, emotionally overpowering dream.
Circles are everywhere: in the quicksilver, spiralling choreography for Sambé, as fluid and as articulate as a du Pré arpeggio; in the actual vinyl records that both spark the story and have such a crucial significance throughout; in the repeated turning of both the curved lighting rig above the stage and the wooden platform (very much in the mould of a modern concert-hall interior) against which all the action plays out. But there is also a potent sense of the story going full circle, of du Pré’s music not only living on, but also allowing history to repeat itself in what we hope, at least, will be the loveliest possible way.
![Marcelino Sambé and Lauren Cuthbertson in The Cellist](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/dance/2020/02/18/TELEMMGLPICT000224873053_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqM37qcIWR9CtrqmiMdQVx7J7k2cmPrfrJIEv9EGYpLSM.jpeg?imwidth=350)
It would be a pity to divulge too many more specifics: far more delightful to watch them constantly unfold for yourself. But I will say that there are trios between du Pré, Barenboim and the cello (or, The Cellist, The Conductor and The Instrument, as the programme has it) of quite astonishing complexity, imagination and emotional heft; that the MS (a condition from which Marston’s mother also suffers) is handled powerfully, tastefully and resourcefully; and that certain scenes towards the end – du Pré’s stricken failure in the concert hall; her ultimate, inevitable rejection of her cello – will break your heart in two, and certainly make you forgive the odd passage of excessive busyness or slight longueur around the halfway mark. (Plaudits, too, to Philip Feeney's score, which wisely lifts snippets from several noted cello pieces – including Elgar's famous concerto – without ever trying to compete with them.)
Lauren Cuthbertson is a marvellous du Pré: rapture itself in the love trysts, destroyed towards the end, but also (thanks to clever inflections in Marston’s steps) at times ever so slightly flat-footed early on, an affectionate nod perhaps to the young du Pré’s robust physicality. If Matthew Ball is rather hunkier than Barenboim has ever been, he also dances beautifully, while Sambé is simply a wonder throughout, utterly convincing as the instrument itself, and like some ungraspable, benign life-force as he first inspires the young du Pré and later swirls around and between the lovers.
Among uniformly first-rate support, look out especially for little Emma Lucano as the young du Pré, Kristen McNally and Thomas Whitehead as her parents, and Gary Avis as a teacher. And notice, too, the way Marston has her central trio repeatedly appear to support and bear each other physically: dramatically spot on, but also, in the most unforced and poetic way, bringing the traditional men-carrying-women chivalry of her art form serenely into the 21st century.
The Cellist is paired with another, older masterpiece of about an hour, Jerome Robbins’s abstract but profoundly humane Chopin fantastia for 10 performers, Dances at a Gathering (1969). This replaced the originally planned new piece by Liam Scarlett that was shelved last year following allegations of sexual misconduct, which remain under investigation.
Of that situation, for now, there is nothing more to be said. But given the fire-hose of mediocrity that has been most of Scarlett’s work for the Royal Ballet, it is impossible not to breathe a sigh of relief at the substitution, with Francesca Hayward, Laura Morera and a drop-dead-magnificent Alexander Campbell the first among excellent equals in this first-rate work.
In rep until March 4. Tickets: 020 7304 4000. The Cellist and Dances at a Gathering will be broadcast live to cinemas on February 25. Details: roh.org.uk