“Waking up begins with saying am and now.”
The start of Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated 1964 novel, “A Single Man,” announces its subject immediately: the consciousness of its protagonist, George, a middle-aged Englishman in Los Angeles, whose grief over the death of his longtime partner, Jim, must be hidden from a world that disapproves of their love.
A new dance work by Jonathan Watkins is based on the novel and had its premiere on Wednesday as part of the Manchester International Festival. It gets going with the same words, after a brief prologue showing us Jim’s death. Outlined by a body-shaped frame, George (the former Royal Ballet principal Ed Watson, returning from retirement) stands rigidly as the musician John Grant — on an elevated platform shaped like a head — sings the words “Now I am am I now.”
It’s explicit: Watson is George’s body, while Grant and his lyrics represent the character’s mind. The ballet takes a more literal approach to Isherwood’s presentation of George’s split being than did Tom Ford’s visually exquisite 2009 film, which offered an impeccably dressed Colin Firth moving tight-lipped through his day, his pain and anguish evoked in flashbacks of memory and nightmare.
The novel, which the writer Edmund White described as “the first truly liberated gay novel in English,” doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate for dance, but Watkins, who has worked as both a choreographer and a stage director, has a history of successful book-to-ballet adaptations, including “1984,” by George Orwell.
Produced by the Royal Ballet and Factory International, which organizes the Manchester International Festival, “A Single Man” features Royal Ballet dancers (Kristen McNally, James Hay) in addition to Watson and a 11-member ensemble. Some have worked with Watkins on projects for the Ballet Queer company, which he founded in 2023.
Watkins began imagining a dance version of “A Single Man” around 2018. “I was thinking about how my own identity aligns with the work I create,” he said in an interview. “Isherwood is writing about mind and body, conscious and subconscious: biological and scientific approaches to these feelings and emotions we go through.”
He had long been a fan of Grant’s music, he added. “I thought, This could be a way to zoom in and hear the thoughts, rants, emotions that George has in the book as he tries to figure out how to be a single man, to forge through after the loss of his lover.”
Grant, a founder of the alternative rock band the Czars and now a singer-songwriter in Iceland, hadn’t read the book and wasn’t immediately convinced that he should write music for a stage piece. “But Jonathan was persistent, and I liked him,” Grant said. “So I read it, and I connected with it so deeply.” It became clear to him, he added, “that it was necessary for me to do it.”
Grant’s confessional songs, which mingle the mundane and the tragic, evoke George’s interior life, while a score by the British Malaysian composer Jasmin Kent Rodgman provides music for his daily doings and his memories of Jim (Jonathan Goddard). Played by Grant and five members of Manchester Collective, the two scores mingle with surprising seamlessness, both using elements of 1960s jazz and minimalism.
“What’s astonishing about the 1960s musically was the level of experimentation coming out of that decade,” said Kent Rodgman, citing Meredith Monk, James Brown, John Adams, Ennio Morricone and the Buchla synthesizer, which she sampled for the score.
Watkins faithfully follows the novel’s trajectory: the course of George’s day as he wakes, dresses, commutes to his college job, lectures and interacts with students, then goes to the gym, to dinner with his friend Charley (McNally, marvelous) and to an ambiguous nighttime encounter with a student, Kenny (Hay). The ensemble represents George’s fellow drivers on the freeway, students, tennis players and, sometimes, abstracted entities in flesh-colored bodysuits who pull Jim away from George toward death.
The narrative progression is managed with theatrical flair. Episodes fold seamlessly into one another, and the smooth transitions between Grant’s sung evocations of George’s daily routine and his thoughts (the words are unobtrusively and helpfully projected onto the set) show the dislocation between the experience of grief and the mundanity of ordinary life.
This “Single Man” is also stylish, with snappy 1960s outfits by Eleanor Bull and Holly Waddington and an ingenious set by Chiara Stephenson that frames the dance in a semicircle of floor-to-rafters open shelves holding objects (books, glasses, bottles, chairs, tennis rackets) that refer to the places and events in the story. Scrims adorned with huge bull’s-eye circles periodically descend when George remembers Jim, moodily lit by Simisola Majekodunmi (who occasionally veers toward the obvious, bathing sex scenes in a lurid red).
Choreographically, however, the show is patchy. Watkins, working mainly in a mix of ballet and contemporary idioms, makes use of Watson’s distinctive flexibility and extreme articulation, and the dancer is marvelous as George, showing the disjunction between ordinary behavior and lacerating grief without melodrama. Here, the acting emerges through the body, as it does in McNally’s wild yet interior-focused movement in the smaller role of Charley.
But Goddard, one of Britain’s finest contemporary dancers, is underused as Jim, despite some fine moments with Watson. And the ensemble dancing — which alternates between amoeba-swirly sequences and the literal acting out of lyrics in Bob Fosse-esque sequences — feels designed to get the characters from one scene to another, rather than interesting in its own right.
Perhaps more unfortunately, this “Single Man” can’t really show us what made the book so important: its evocation of the ordinariness of gay love and loss at a time when that experience was denied. We hear about social attitudes through Grant’s songs (“First they were anathema, now just sick in the head”), but the explicitly sexual male duos that are the choreographic evidence of George and Jim’s mutual desire feel unsurprising today, and they don’t invoke the mundane domesticity and companionship that are the more central loss in the novel.
One of the strengths of dance as an art form is that movement can evoke inchoate emotions that are too subtle for mere language. Yet in “A Single Man,” Watkins tells us insistently what is happening. The dance is firmly yoked to the words and the story. Only when it occasionally escapes, through Watson’s grief-molded body, are we able to feel something larger: the unmeasurable, fluctuating sensations of sadness, pain and the joy of living.
The post ‘A Single Man,’ a Classic Gay Novel, Becomes a Ballet appeared first on New York Times.
