To Beat or Not to Beat

Hamlet came tooling onstage on a red motor scooter and sat eying three maniacal traffic signs: "To Be," "Not to Be," and "No Entry." He was tossing the skull of Yorick in the air, pondering how to flip his directional signals, when a stagehand reversed the "To Be" sign, revealing the words "To Egypt." Sure enough, Cleopatra appeared and started to shimmy.

Thus a capacity audience at Brussel's Royal Opera House was introduced to one of the most demented ballets ever staged: Choreographer Maurice Bejart's Such Sweet Thunder, set to music by Duke Ellington. Originally written for Canada's Stratford Shakespearean Festival, Thunder is a 14-part suite obscurely inspired by a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream: "I never heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder." Ellington's musical rogue's gallery glimpses of Shakespearean heroes and heroines in turn inspired Choreographer Bejart to paste together a 45-minute dance work that he describes as "part serious, part caricature, part dowdy--like the Bolshoi." It turned out to be a kind of beatnik's As You Like It.

Thunder's curtain rose on a stageful of workmen still putting the scenery in place. A man in the balcony shouted, "Don't come home too late tonight!" Through a loudspeaker a voice called, "Monsieur Bejart is wanted at the concierge's!" When things quieted down, Puck emerged from a wicker basket, wearing a pair of baby-blue wings, and three saucy minxes (Titania, Hermia. Helena) bumped and ground their way across the stage. In Sonnet for Sister Kate, an untamed shrew in an orange wig and a southof-the-navel decollete shimmied front and center, then disappeared into the wings, where she was received by the chatter of an offstage machine gun. In Lady Mac, a racy temptress in slinky black writhed atop the piano, then hopped to the floor to join four muscular gangsters in an apache dance. From behind swinging saloon doors popped three witches riding broomsticks and dressed in skin-tight blue jeans.

Most critics panned the work, but the audience seemed to dig it despite the fact that it followed that popular old war horse, Les Sylphides. The audience's reaction, observed one ardent avant-gardist, was entirely natural. "Thunder," said he, "is alive. Sylphides is like old toothpaste stuck in your teeth."

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