Gentleman Jack
Gritty and sexy, and filled with the passions and power of a beautiful Northern love story.
Northern Ballet returns to Norwich Theatre Royal this week with 'Gentleman Jack', the company's first full-length ballet work to be commissioned since former Royal Ballet dancer Ferderico Bonelli took over as Artistic Director in 2022. Bonelli was looking for a story that had not been told before through dance, and was clearly inspired by the story of Anne Lister, a Victorian diarist from a wealthy family in Yorkshire, whose coded writings later revealed her extraordinary life and loves. Lister's diaries had already been the inspiration for two series of the successful BBC-HBO television drama 'Gentleman Jack', and Bonelli employed the show's creator, Sally Wainwright, as Creative Consultant for the project. Choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and composer Peter Salem were also part of the creative team.
The result is an engrossing and fascinating two-act ballet, book-ended by a short prologue and epilogue that, whilst adapting certain elements of the story, captures the spirit and the passions of Anne Lister's life and loves.
Words are a key motif throughout the work. Four large bookcases form a large part of Christopher Ash's set design, their shelves packed with anonymous grey volumes, but which are rotated through 180 degrees to reveal video screens that lend an impression of being outside – dark skies and storm clouds, wild moorland landscapes, and the gardens of Lister's family home at Shibden Hall, near Halifax. The 'Chorus of Words', dancers who visit whenever Lister is deep in thought, wear beige leotards bearing fragments of her coded diary entries, some of which also appear on the walls of the set.
But it is the striking figure of Anne Lister herself, tonight portrayed by Turkish dancer Nida Aydinoğlu, dressed in top hat and green-lined frock coat, who spectacularly embodies the passion and the power in Anne Lister's life. Surrounded by men, she controls every action around her, unafraid of upsetting anyone, from miners to management. But it is the women in her life that become the subject of her secret writings. Her heart is broken when her first love Mariana (danced by Sarah Chun) marries Charles Lawton (Jonathan Hanks). Her affections switch to her Shibden Hall neighbour Ann Walker, who is played by French dancer Julie Nunès, and the pair become lovers and long-term partners.
The ballet is a visual treat, from the passionate pas-de-deux on the dining room table between Anne and Mariana, to the twenty members of the Chorus of Words flooding the stage during the symbolic wedding between her and Ann Walker at the end of Act 2. There is always something happening to keep the audience firmly rooted in the Shibden dramas.
We are blessed with a live orchestra to perform Peter Salem's evocative score, and I find myself swept up in the romantic drama, as well as the toughness and hardship of 19th century Northern industrial life. Each is depicyed in stark contrast against what, at the time, would have been considered scandalous behaviour being conducted behind boardroom doors. Gritty and sexy, and filled with the passions and power of a beautiful Northern love story.
Gentleman Jack continues at Norwich Theatre Royal until Saturday May 30th , before continuing its UK tour at The Lowry in Salford.
