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The design is largely stripped back, and effective for the restraint. There is a heap of fine and transcendent choreography in here, but just not enough to fill an entire ballet. The slaves indulge in lots of haka-like gestures, and the crotch-thrusting bacchanalia that opens the second act seems almost parodic. Jervies’s choreography is strangely divorced from the music – long melodic phrases seem poorly matched to the arrested, choppy movements in the dance – and every time he reaches for the ritualistic, it comes off as cheap and silly. Hendricks is likewise magnificent, sharp but somehow luxurious, with a third act pas de deux with Jackson that threatened to bring the house down.
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As his treasured concubine Tertulla, Amy Harris is extraordinary there’s a poise and a confidence in her dancing that made the curtain-call announcement of her elevation to principal seem inevitable. King-Wall stands in stark contrast: lithe and responsive, his body seems to ooze across the stage, serpentine and yet strangely seductive. He commits to the role completely, and there are moments of sheer genius, but his body shape is often a hindrance to his technique. His bunched shoulder muscles seem to throw off his usually glorious lines. He has bulked up his body so much – more than anything else, he recalls Tom Hardy’s Bane from The Dark Knight Rises – that it interferes with his extensions. Jackson is a fine, supple dancer, and there’s a sense that the company have long had him in mind for this role, but the results aren’t entirely successful. Only Spartacus himself is willing to embody the deeds of mercy, and it is this alone that elevates him.
Even Flavia, when given the chance, tortures her oppressors mercilessly. Spartacus’s best friend Hermes (Jake Mangakahia) refuses it, to his peril. Certainly Crassus (Ty King-Wall), the general who eventually crushes the slave revolt, has no use for it. Mercy, or the complete lack of it, is a theme that Jervies exploits in interesting ways. This Spartacus comes reluctantly to every battle, and is the first to offer mercy. His Spartacus (Kevin Jackson) is more a figure of resistance than rebellion while there are classic revolutionary gestures in the piece – notably the downing of a massive statue of an iron fist that closes the first act – the overall impression is of a man who simply wants to escape tyranny and live quietly with his wife, Flavia (Robyn Hendricks). This interpretive fluidity in the material gives choreographers plenty of scope, and Lucas Jervies cuts his own path through the iconography that has built up around the man. It’s proof that one person’s Genesis myth is another’s Book of Revelation. When Russian composer Aram Khachaturian penned his ballet score three years later, it was ostensibly to curry favour with the Soviet regime after the death of Stalin. US author Howard Fast’s 1951 novel was written when he was in prison for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The figure of Spartacus, the Thracian slave who led a failed rebellion against his Roman overlords in 71 BC, has captured the public imagination in countries all over the world, but most significantly in America and Russia.