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My week started badly with some very impressive projectile vomiting during the early hours of Tuesday morning. This proved to be the result of salmonella poisoning which I - and the rest of the guests contracted at my beloved God daughters first birthday party. A couple of days later I crawled into the West End with the intention of buying a birthday present for her father; his birthday being today. Like me, her father studied ballet before becoming an actor, and also like me has a great love for the art. So I decided to buy him a copy of the Diane Solway biography on Rudolf Nureyev which of all the biographies on Nureyev I consider to be far and away the best. Whilst I was plucking it from the shelf, I noticed a NEW one had been released and as I read every book on Nureyev needless to say I purchased a copy for myself. I didn't hold out much hope that it would be anything but the usual turgid rubbish written by someone who had met him for 20 minutes and decided to cash in on his formidable fame by writing a book knowing that there are enough schmucks like me out there to buy it and make it financially very viable. So imagine my delight when it turned out to be wonderful! The author, Carolyn Soutar was a stage manager at the Coliseum where Nureyev gave many performances, and worked with him for six seasons. So it's written from a back stage perspective, and having a certain insight myself into back stage machinations, I found it hugely amusing. I suspect a lot of my readers are too young ever to have seen the great man dance, but one of the advantages of being an old lady is that I did see him dance, not once but many times. He was a member of the Kirov Ballet Company and during a tour of Europe, he dramatically defected at Orly airport in Paris in 1962. This in itself was a remarkable feat - relations with Russia still being decidedly iffy at that time, but what really captured the imagination of the public was the incredible charisma of the man himself. He was in his early 20's and in possession of a physical beauty that took one's breath away. He was unlike anything we had seen before, both within the world of ballet and without. He was unquestionably the first pop star of the time, in so far as everything he did was photographed, recorded and put into the public domain. When he was invited to dance with Dame Margot Fonteyn at Covent Garden the theatre erupted after the performance and the two of them became a phenomena. Fonteyn was 42, regarded as royalty by the British public and thinking about retiring when this 23 year old boy became her partner and released a passion in her dancing that had not been there before. They became the greatest partnership in the history of ballet. I first saw them dance at the Hollywood Bowl in California in the late 60's. The production was Swan Lake and as I watched this magical story unfold in that magical setting, I fell irrevocably, totally and completely in love with Nureyev (along with the rest of the women, and a lot of the men in the audience) and have remained so ever since. He was awesome because he contained elements that were both human and supernatural; he was both man and animal which combined to generate a ferocious sexuality. I had never seen his like before, nor indeed since. He was the epitome of the Prince; the dream of so many women, and unlike previous male dancers whose role had been to support the ballerina, he was undoubtedly the STAR! No matter who else was on stage, it was impossible to look at anyone but the Russian. The relationship between him and Fonteyn was electric and their legend was born. Despite his well recorded homosexuality, on stage he was the essence of masculinity, a powerhouse of energy who enabled time to be suspended for his audience, which lets face it, is no mean feat. I was consumed by my passion for this wild, primitive, erotic creature and went to his performances at the Coliseum every year with the same fervour that Christians must feel when they visit Lourdes. I am not a religious person, but I left the theatre once after watching him dance a performance of Song of the Wayfarer, music by [Gustav] Mahler knowing there was a God. That is some talent... There was a huge feeling of excitement in the theatre prior to each performance. The sense of anticipation, the awareness that one was going to witness something unique and unforgettable, even if he wasn't dancing at his best. As one critic observed, 'Nureyev on an off night is better than any other dancer at their best'. One of the many things I admired about him was a note he had put in the programmes,; 'Rudolf Nureyev guarantees to dance at every performance'. Which he did; he may not always have been at his best, but he was ALWAYS there, giving the best that he was capable of at the time. You don't get many artistes like that to the pound, then or now.
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