Although Monday’s cast looked strong enough on paper not everyone was on top form

Although Monday’s cast looked strong enough on paper, not everyone was on top form and this took the shine off some of the choreography. The work was created in 1950 when Lincoln Kirstein asked Ashton to create something for the New York City Ballet. The choreographer was a huge fan of Rimbaud and, with the help of Benjamin Britten’s 1940 song-cycle Les Illuminations and Cecil Beaton’s deliberately child-like designs, he created a cryptic work which explored the work of the teenage poet and alluded – with necessary restraint – to events in his unhappy life The curtain rises on a twilit tableau of pierrots. At their centre is the poet (Jonathan Cope), who begins his dream-like progression through Rimbaud’s mystical landscape. The Sacred and Profane Loves that shape his destiny are danced by Darcey Bussell and Benazir Hussein. Bussell’s Sacred Love is the more successful interpretation: her great gifts of length and strength give her dancing an unhurried air that easily suggests the languor of the underwater drawing-room that Ashton and Beaton had conceived. Jonathan Cope’s poet enjoys a brief and sordid liaison with his Profane Love but at the end, bleeding and broken, he staggers offstage in pursuit of the Sacred one.
The evening’s second, palate-cleansing piece is Symphonic Variations, made by Ashton in 1946 after leaving the Air Force.

Although the company has been accused of neglecting its heritage, it has been striving to make amends with painstaking revivals and new productions. The latest Ashton bill at Covent Garden opened on Monday night with Symphonic Variations, The Dream and an overdue revival of Illuminations, which began the programme. It certainly won’t have any violence in it; he left the cinema in disgust during a showing of Reservoir Dogs, and worries about films that have “no concern for the violence in the world”.”It’s a twisted black comedy about women who fall in love with convicts behind bars,” says Haynes of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s film. “It’s about how the perfect relationship is with someone who is locked up!” Haynes, the irrepressible wunderkind of American movies, ying to Tarantino’s yang, is set to change his style yet again.n `Safe’ opens on 26 April in London and selected venues nationwide. The Royal Ballet’s Ashton repertoire is like a fine string of pearls: if no one takes them out and wears them in the full glow of limelight they lose their lustre and start to look like old false teeth. It’s about someone running away from a hostile environment rather than trying to change it.Haynes brushes aside the accusation that he has somehow stopped being a gay director by making a film without any gay people in it Just look at Fassbinder “Fassbinder is one of my idols. He’d go to New York and have his meetings at The Mineshaft! But his films weren’t about gay people They were about women I was a feminist before I was ever gay.

Feminism was my first real language for dealing with an oppressive, rigid society. I’m incredibly close to women and love them but have never felt sexual towards them.”Perhaps sensing his feminist credentials, Jennifer Jason Leigh was so impressed with Safe she asked Haynes to direct a script she’s been developing with David Thewlis He has few problems about making a more mainstream film. I’m disturbed how New Age thought has become so similar to right-wing thought You’re responsible for your own shit No special privileges for the disenfranchised. Go out there and compete.” In this sense Safe is more a metaphor for politics than disease. The whole idea of the internal `self’ being this pure thing that we have access to and once you make contact your life falls into place, I think it really sucks. “This notion that people were somehow to blame for their illness, and the so-called empowerment this provides, really upsets me. An invisible miasma of blame and guilt, far more toxic than any modern chemical, descends over Carol’s life.

She gets more and more sick until she finally ends up in a Kubrick-style white igloo, its filtered sterile environment an escape capsule from planet earth.Haynes isn’t being satirical He’s been accused of this and it annoys him. “I think it’s clear who the bad guys are and they’re the guys at the commune,” he says. “But I did want to make a film that questioned whether she was physically sick or not.” He denies that it is a metaphor for Aids, “which everyone knows is physically real”, though his awareness of the 1980s migration of gay men into New Age health communes has played a strong role in his increasing distaste for such places. We are all responsible for our own illness, claims the resident guru.