Tatiana Tchernobrovkina, an aloof if gorgeous Odette on first night, blossomed later in the week when cast against her own husband as Siegfried. The first Siegfried, Georgy Smilevski – whose maniacal smiling may have been his way of dealing with disaster – came into his own when cast opposite his spouse, Natalia Krapivina, a warm, secure and convincingly captivating swan.Easy to see how one could get hooked, and turn into one of those geeks who turns up to every show. Even as venerable a construct as a 50-year-old production of Swan Lake can spring surprises. Which is of course what live performance is all about.j.gilbert independent.co.uk. By the time Judi Dench has put them through the wringer, I expect many cinema audiences will be ready to canonise Iris Murdoch without more ado.
She and her husband, John Bayley, already appear on tabloid lists of great lovers of our time, just behind Posh and Becks. Those wanting more evidence of saintliness face an uphill task, so here is a brief guide. Here, characters, typically isolated in some hothouse away from any economic or cultural surrounds, appear to exist only for playing nasty erotic games with each other. Try, for instance, The Unicorn, set in a country house in Ireland, or The Bell, an exploration of a confrontation between religious faith and suppressed sexuality.Malcolm Bradbury assembled a useful list of recurring types in Iris Murdoch’s books: the Near-Saint and the Failed Priest, the Strange Enchanter and the Love-Prisoner, the Haunted Child and the Deathbed Contemplative, the Bookish Bureaucrat and the Radiant Woman.Bradbury also caught her tone perfectly in the opening line of his parody: “Flavia says that Hugo tells her that Augustina is in love with Fred” (which meets the understandable, if pedantic, reply: “Who says whom tells her who is in love with whom?”). But a greater obstacle than the novels is the daunting fact that Iris Murdoch was a philosopher. So what did she stand for, and should we stand beside her?The War: Her philosophy was formed against the background of the Second World War, with all its disillusion and lost ideals. During most of the war she was a member of the Communist Party, but neither that faith nor any more simple faith in western civilisation easily survived the war and its aftermath.Caf?ociety: The existentialist hero – melodramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social – was one product of this climate.
This archetypal character of Fifties writing recognises no authority, but takes responsibility for his own free acts of will and creates his own values as he goes along. He sneers, wears leather, loafs about in caf? and smokes Gauloises. There is a more sinister Christian version, in which he does all these things with a dog-collar.Flirting with God: From the beginning Murdoch rejected existentialism Its freedom and its disconnected self were illusions. There had to be “something more”: an independent source of standards, a beacon to guide us, a spiritual compass, a discipline. Catholicism and High Anglicanism were quick to offer themselves She attended retreats and abbeys.
