State Ballet of Georgia: Swan Lake review

We get a blast of the old school with the State Ballet of Georgia’s version of the world’s most loved ballet. Rigorous Russian schooling and style are on show; character and narrative drive are very much not the priority.

Quite the switch from the versions of this work that we’re used to – it’s disconcerting to see a Prince Siegfried so blankly composed that he seems almost completely detached from the events happening around him. You’d have to check the programme synopsis to know that he’s ‘overcome with grief’ at the end of the third scene, when he realises that he’s been tricked into losing the love of his life. I’ve seen more emotion from someone who’s had their favourites substituted in their online grocery shopping.

Oleh Lihai compensates in other ways, though. His tall, slender frame seems almost weightless as he soars through leaps and spins with a chiselled precision. And although he and Nino Samadashvili, playing Odette/Odile, don’t generate much chemistry, he’s a sure and grounded partner.

Samadashvili herself has a considered grace and lovely line, if not quite the swan arms that you might hope for when she’s playing Odette, queen of the swan maidens. Again, there seems to be no sense of compunction on her part to inhabit the emotional drama of her role, although she gets more fire in her belly as the evil black swan Odile, dispatched to fool Siegfried into betraying his love. Such a shame, though, that everything stops for her to take bows after the famous fouetté series in the grand pas de deux. The thundering, hurtling tempestuousness of Tchaikovsky’s score – which gets a particularly thundering rendition by the English National Opera orchestra under Papuna Gvaberidze – is stopped dead, all momentum lost. 

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