Don Juan Royal Lyceum *****
Drama and dance often make uneasy bedfellows. But Mats Ek's production of Don Juan, brought to Edinburgh by Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre, choreographs a classic text with rare brilliance: Ek uses the skills he acquired with the Cullberg Ballet Company to give Molière's study of an atheistic seducer a prodigious, and highly erotic, physical life.
Ek highlights the theatricality of the play throughout. Mikael Persbrandt's imposing Don Juan is not just an arithmetic bed-hopper but a fetishistic role-player: he dons a black wig when in seductive mode and, in flight, becomes a masked, sombrero-clad Zorro. Maria Geber's design deploys romantic landscape panels that ironically evoke a vanished pictorialism. And, at the climax, the hero is hoisted up to the top of a reversed flat, as if impaled by his own love of theatricality.
But what makes Ek's production startlingly different from other Don Juans is its transformation of actors into dancers. Persbrandt and Nina Togner Fex's Dona Elvira at one point do a sexually charged pas de deux. Niklas Ek's ageing Sganarelle is not just the voice of virtue but a formidable athlete who slides horizontally across a table like a fast-moving parcel. And the Don's female victims are given a head-inclined, lateral style of movement as if their natural equilibrium had been destroyed by the hero's assaults.
The miracle of Ek's production is that it gives the play a vividly choreographed energy without losing its philosophical arguments. Persbrandt's impressive Don Juan becomes a narcissistic nihilist who tries on any role he fancies: a god-defying seducer, a masked avenger, even a fashionable social hypocrite. But Ek emphasises the character's sheer nastiness in the scene where he offers a beggar money in payment for blasphemy and then kicks the purse just out of his reach; and when Sganarelle lectures his master on the fantastic nature of mankind, the hero slumps in front of a television set.
Ek uses any number of devices to highlight his theme that Don Juan is really a man on the run terrified of any lasting relationship. Best of all, he casts the actress who plays Dona Elvira as the indigent beggar, a male creditor and even as Elvira's brother to emphasise the point that the supposed libertine is in reality a haunted, hunted man. You could object that Ek sometimes ignores the letter of Molière's text: the peasant girl, Charlotte, whom Don Juan pursues, here becomes a provocative, bum-wiggling cleaner. But Ek captures the spirit of the play superbly, in particular its portrait of the spiritual emptiness of self-enraptured egotism.
Above all, Ek's production combines physical exhilaration with serious fun. There's a lovely moment when Sganarelle, as part of Molière's sidewipe at the medical profession, turns himelf into a fraudulent shrink analysing his genuinely disturbed master. A great play has been rethought and turned into an ironic commentary on our modern belief in passionless hedonism and fluctuating identity. Although its stay is tragically brief, it is exactly the kind of life-enhancing event for which one goes to an international festival.
Ends tonight. Box office: 0131-473-2000. ***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
