Review: Northern Ballet’s GENTLEMAN JACK, Sadler’s Wells
Photo credit: Tristram Kenton
A previously obscure historical figure, Anne Lister was recently brought back to life and popular acclaim in Sally Wainwright’s period drama Gentleman Jack. Sally Wainwright’s screenwriting has long kept the lesbian community fed with queer and women-focused narratives, and her creative consultancy is turned now to a brand-new ballet that tells the story of Yorkshire’s Gentleman Jack.
Northern Ballet’s world premiere production tells the story of a powerful and influential figure in Yorkshire’s coal mining industry who lived according to her own rules – brash, swaggering and uncompromising. The design of this show is sleek, minimal and modern, with nineteenth century gestures, notably in Louise Flanagan’s costumes. Likewise Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s choreography mixes contemporary and classical, with Jemima Brown – co-creator of Lady Gaga’s viral ‘Dead Dance’ – bringing in some striking pop influences. The melange of the traditional and the new is everything that Gentleman Jack represents – a person living outside their own time, brought to life and fame in a modern context after her codified diaries were finally discovered and translated long after her death.
Gentleman Jack is a testament to the eloquence of dance as a language and ballet as a mode of storytelling. Anne Lister’s history is steeped in text, which Lopez Ochoa acknowledges with the chorus of ‘Words’ in this production – who knot themselves into the embodiment of Anne’s coded diaries, loaded with longing and secrets waiting to be released.
Peter Salem’s score not only drives the surging lesbian yearning in Anne’s story, but underscores Anne’s ruthless professional pursuits with punchy industrial beats – capturing her vulnerability and sensuousness as well as her resilience and brazenness.
The various pas-de-deux sequences each present different relationships and gender dynamics between characters. The choreography plays with masculine and feminine motifs and, in each of these dances, Gemma Coutts as Anne Lister is nothing short of breathtaking. Most striking is the final pas-de-deux in which Anne is at her most vulnerable and feminine – draped in a veil and matching her partner’s stance en pointe, she is finally allowed to be herself and embrace her femininity. She is allowed to love a woman without having to pose as a man – a beautiful and soaring moment of pure female desire, freed from the strictures of Victorian society.
Northern Ballet have triumphed with this impossibly sexy production that celebrates love and individuality through the lens of Yorkshire’s belatedly celebrated lesbian icon. Truly unmissable – a brave and beautiful ballet.
***** Five stars
Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett
