Nijinsky's Last Dance
, written by Norman Allen, played at Berkshire Theatre Festival's intimate and charming Unicorn Theatre June 11 through July 12. The 90-minute solo encounter with the legendary Russian dancer (performed by Jeremy Davidson) begins and ends in the asylum where Nijinsky was to spend too much of his life.The production, directed by Joe Calarco, draws heavily on all design elements (setting by Michael Fagin, lighting by Daniel MacLean Wagner, sound by David Maddox and costuming by Anne Kennedy) so that the whole is easily greater than the sum of its component parts. We are asked to understand and to experience the swift departures from reality that Nijinsky himself endures, and the bold physical production supports this endeavour.
The text itself is unresolved on the matter of whether we are intruding into the mind of one possessed by demons too powerful for the individual to contain with any degree of control or whether we are following a chronological journey of a famous man's history. The full-throttled opening scene, played at high pitch and sustained by the physically grounded Davidson (the actor's body is much more in tune than his voice which sounded weary and badly strained in the final week) eventually gives way to a more predictable biographical check-list of dates, places and people in the dancer's life.
Allen's strongest moments are those which explore the nature of artistic creation and the unknowable region that acknowledged genius will explore without apology or explanation. But the writing falters when the character is essentially upstaged by others' voices. The playwright, aided perhaps by the director, chooses to represent the key figures in Nijinsky's life -- Diaghilev, his wife, his first dance instructor and others -- so that we see and hear them as Nijinsky knew them. And while the reasoning is sound (we all see people in our lives through an entirely subjective lens) the result here is that the visitors become more fascinating than the principal himself. Ultimately, we are unable to see anything but Nijinsky's perspective, and that doesn't allow for enough clarity or detail for us to separate what is real from what is imagined. And while the playwright dramatizes the reality of a fevered mind, he fails to explain Nijinsky's descent into madness. It happens and we are witness to it, but we are always at a remove.
If madness cannot be explained, and to Allen's credit we accept that the subject himself is not nor cannot be his own physician, then the playwright needs to tell his story so that Nijinsky's life, for all its fame and pain, rises above the merely biographical.