This year's largest-scale theatre production at the Manchester International Festival is the first collaboration between MIF—or at least with its production company, Factory International—and The Royal Ballet.
The source for this original production is the novel of the same name by Christopher Isherwood, probably best-known for the stories on which the musical Cabaret was based, adapted by award-winning choreographer and director Jonathon Watkins (who spoke to us about the production for the BTG podcast).
However his collaborators are not necessarily as well-known for their work in theatre as for in other media: set designer Chiara Stephenson has worked with contemporary music performers such as SZA, Lorde, Florence and the Machine and Björk, and costume designer Holly Waddington won an Oscar—amongst other awards—for her work on the film Poor Things. This is what MIF does best: bringing together people from different disciplines and creating large-scale experiments on which most companies could not afford to take a risk.
And then there's singer-songwriter John Grant, who has not only written original songs for the show but also performs them live as George, placed on a platform inside the outline of a head to emphasise that this is all going on in his mind, while Royal Ballet Principal Edward Watson is George's body in the scenes and flashbacks on the stage below.
The plot is described in a text projected on the gauze at the start thus: "a day in the body and mind of George, visited by the memory of his lover Jim, who died some months before". Isherwood's George is a middle-aged college professor in America in the early 1960s, soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. On stage, we see George's memories of Jim (Jonathan Goddard) and Jim's lover Doris (Kristen McNally) and suggestions of the car crash that killed him and injured her combined with his everyday life in college, played by ensemble dancers who also morph into more ghostly, abstract characters haunting his mind.
George meets someone new, Kenny (James Hay), and they swim naked in the sea together, but George is still having suicidal thoughts. Even when George is having a good time, the lyrics tell us that it is only happy because "death is in the future". The song to finish, fans of John Grant will recognise as "Glacier" from his 2013 album Pale Green Ghosts, which says "This pain / It is a glacier moving through you", but in a nice ending of hope, Grant descends from his platform—coming 'out of his head'—to hug Watson, his other self.
It helps to know something of the story, even if it is only the description in the publicity, in advance, as it isn't clear from the choreography alone, and Grant's words are more concerned with the character's feelings than with describing plot, although Watkins's direction and choreography, a pleasingly jarring mixture of ballet and contemporary dance, combined with the design set the scenes and the moods fairly clearly. The songs work well, with Grant's rich, sonorous vocal delivery, and combine seamlessly with the music of Jasmin Kent Rodgman, played live by the Manchester Collective (no names are given in the programme), while the whole thing looks stunning on Aviva's huge Hall stage.
A brand new production from The Royal Ballet premièring in Manchester and a set of new songs from John Grant played live would individually be well worth a look, but bringing the two together has resulted in an intriguing and impressive headline event for this year's festival.