Royal Opera House, Linbury theatre, London
Maurice Béjart’s adaptation of Happy Days sees Alessandra Ferri up to her hips in ballet shoes in this sparse, dreamlike work
Alessandra Ferri is drowning in a mountain of pointe shoes. A huge pile of pink satin almost fills the stage, and in the centre the 58-year-old ballerina, visible only from the waist up, is buried in the tools of her trade. Every shoe is a link to the past, “I remember!” she says, holding up a pair and humming a melody from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. She taps the toes to see how hard they are. “They’ll still do for the second act.”
This is not Ferri’s story, though. The role is credited only as “She”, but essentially she is Winnie from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which inspired choreographer Maurice Béjart to make this work. (In the play, Winnie is buried in sand, not shoes.) Béjart changed the central character to an ageing ballerina, originally created for the Italian dancer Carla Fracci, in 1998. Ferri is only the third woman to perform the role – the other was Maina Gielgud, who helped Ferri reconstruct it for this production.
At the Royal Opera House’s Linbury theatre, London, until 23 October.