Spectrum Magazine, Scotland on Sunday
By Adrian Turpin
AS FAR as artistic endeavours go, ice-skating has always had an image problem, up there with Morris dancing and mime. Torvill and Dean have been saluted for their artistry, but let’s not get carried away. An ice-rink is too big a stage from which to play to an audience in the sense that an actor might understand it. Ice shows have occasionally done spectacle well, but where they traditionally fall down is in conveying emotional depth.
It’s understandable, really. Strap a pair of skates onto an actor, give them enough training and, provided you don’t ask them to deviate much from a straight line, you might get them to produce a reasonable impersonation of a competition skater. But you really couldn’t expect them to master a double toe-loop.
Why, then, assume the reverse to be true? Why should a skater who has spent most of their life in sport be able to convey sorrow or passion convincingly? With all due respect to Olympic heroes past, the unprecedented string of 12 perfect 6.0 scores for Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ could not disguise the fact that Torvill and Dean possessed all the sexual chemistry of a St John’s ambulance mouth-to-mouth resuscitation class. Acting is acting and skating is skating. A line in the ice is drawn.
At least, that’s how it was until Tony Mercer and his Imperial Ice Stars appeared on the scene. When The Sleeping Beauty on Ice arrives at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre next month, it will come with the blessings rather than the condescension of several esteemed dance critics. When the show reaches London later in March, it will be staged at Sadler’s Wells, the capital’s home of serious dance.
Bluff, bearded and Manchester-born, Mercer is at first sight an unlikely-looking figure to reinvent the ice show. For a start, he doesn’t skate. ("The skaters in the company keep trying to get me onto the rink, but I’d be far too embarrassed. I’m afraid I’d lose their respect," he says.) A leg injury made him give up his ambitions to be a professional footballer. Instead, he cut his showbusiness teeth working as a lighting designer and tour manager for, among others, The Three Degrees, New Order and Johnny Mathis.
He first got involved in the world of ice shows in 1993. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s break-up, the Russian skating coach Tatiana Tarasova brought a company of skaters to Britain to perform an ice ballet. Tarasova is a legendary figure in Russian skating. Her triumphs have included guiding Alexei Yagudin, Ilya Kulik, and the pairs skaters Klimova and Pomorenko, and Rodnina and Zaitsev, to Olympic gold. Until 12 years ago, however, she had never put an ice show on a theatre stage before.
"My involvement with the artistic side happened almost by chance," says Mercer, who was initially employed as a production manager. "I’d be looking at the show, thinking maybe this would be better or that would be better, until finally someone said, ‘All right, Tony, you’ve got all the ideas, now shut up and go away and do it.’ That was how I became a director.
"For me, it was always about theatrical presentation. Ice-skating competition has a standard package of technical elements, things that skaters have to do for the judges. If you ever watch the championships, you are basically going to see the same things all the time. So my ethos was always that, if you were going to make skating come alive on stage, you need to reinvent and expand beyond those elements. It is all about telling a story. You can have a technically gifted skater who looks great in costume, but if they can’t present a character to the audience the job is only half done."
That partnership between the Mancunian and the Muscovite turned out to be an inspired and long-lasting one. She had the technical know-how, he had the theatrical vision. When Mercer set up his own company, The Imperial Ice Stars, in 2004, he didn’t have to look far to find the choreographer for their first production, The Sleeping Beauty on Ice.
I saw it in Hong Kong, where it played briefly after a tour of Australia and New Zealand. It seemed an unusual juxtaposition of location and show. There’s something disconcerting about leaving the 20¼C heat of Victoria island - sun ricocheting of IM Pei’s Bank of China skyscraper, shirt-sleeved tourists fiddling with their shades on the ferry to Kowloon - and stepping into a winter wonderland. You are made sharply aware that, for all the production’s old-fashioned appeal, it wouldn’t be possible without modern technology - the huge chiller units outside the theatre create the 14 tons of ice required, and keep it at a constant -8¼C.
Still, technology only goes so far, and on stage the results are impressive from the moment the curtain rises on the enchanted forest. Played by the feline Maria Borovikova, the Black Fairy, Carabosse, radiates furious energy. One critic described her as a kind of "crazed goth-metal groupie, prone to getting tossed around by her own evil entourage like an Ann Summers basque-and-tights combo at a particularly competitive jumble sale". No one, though, could accuse the flamboyant prologue, with its steepling lifts and corkscrew spins, of lacking atmosphere.
For the story of The Sleeping Beauty to work, the audience needs to believe in the reality of evil, and Borovikova oozes it through every pore. She may convince you that a fairy can fly (there is some smart trick skating, using a harness) but, just as importantly, she lets you know that a skater can act.
By the time the action shifts to the court of King Floristan, where the fairies gather for the christening of Princess Aurora, the sense of foreboding is palpable - and a few preconceptions have been demolished. This fairy-tale wears skates, but it is clearly more than the sum of its individual jumps. That said, it would be wrong to dismiss entirely the thrill of watching large numbers of skaters moving around a small space at high speed. In this respect, it’s a bit like watching a Formula One grand prix: while no one exactly welcomes a smash, the ever-present risk of disaster adds spice to the event. Mercer acknowledges this. "People are racing round at 35 to 40 kilometres an hour. Ice-skating is dangerous. It’s all about split-second timing. That’s a joy to watch."
While skaters seek perfection, there’s an irony that the show benefits from the occasional mistake. "You watched the show last night," Mercer tells me. "For the first 14 minutes there wasn’t an error, and I was kind of uneasy." That problem was solved when one of the supporting fairies got one of her blades caught in a groove during a particularly tight turn, clipped the edge of the set and went sprawling skates over tutu. It may have been painful and embarrassing for her, but afterwards you could hear the particular silence that descends on a theatre only when an audience is concentrating. "It’s easy for the audience almost to forget they are watching an ice show and how difficult some of these moves are," Mercer says. "A crash like that can be an effective reminder."
Happily, Russian skaters tend to be tough as old boots. Gashes and knocks that would put a professional footballer out of action for weeks tend to be shrugged off. Last year, Borovikova tore a ligament in her shoulder, but she simply strapped up her arm and carried on with the Sleeping Beauty tour. The lesson that the show must go on is not learnt in the theatre. Instead, it’s instilled by coaches in the cut-throat world of Russian competitive skating. You do not become the dominant force in world skating by being soft.
The part of the Sleeping Beauty herself is played by Mandy Woetzel, a German - in fact, the only member of the cast who doesn’t originate from the former Soviet Union. Woetzel, whose tiny frame, blonde bob and childlike looks hide a steely perfectionism, has been skating for almost as long as she has been walking, having taken her first lesson at the age of four. Her list of medals takes up an imposing chunk of the show’s souvenir brochure, and includes golds in the pairs event at the European and world championships, as well as a bronze at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Calgary.
This testifies to an ability to deal with pressure, yet she admits to being intimidated by her first experience of skating on a stage. For starters, she suffered from vertigo: skaters are not used to performing five feet above the people watching them. Just as alarming was the size of the rink. "It’s like skating on an ice-cube," she says. "The rehearsals were on a normal ice-rink, so they had just marked where the edges of the stage would be. And I just went, ‘Oops.’"
Despite all her competitive experience and a spell with Holiday on Ice, Woetzel found herself having to relearn the way she skated to suit the constraints of the stage. "At first, just learning to skate to an audience on one side was difficult," she says. "I was fortunate because my partner in the show [the former USSR team member Vadim Yarkov] showed me how to make the lifts work. On a big ice-rink, you pick up speed then turn on the diagonal. But in a theatre all the lifts have to be in a tight circle, because otherwise there isn’t enough space."
Jumping for height rather than distance becomes the order of the day. "It’s a very strange feeling when you are standing on stage doing a turn and 50cm behind you are four boys. Then there are the times where you find yourself standing in one place. I’m not used to that. You have to learn how to spin and spin and spin. My head was like, ‘Aaargh!’ It was very unusual."
Pushing skaters beyond the bounds of what they are familiar and comfortable with is what Mercer and Tarasova do best. In the show’s most startling passage, the Lilac Fairy (played by former ice-dancer Olga Sharoutenko with a grace and relative stillness that contrasts neatly with the frantic aggression of Carabosse) is carried on her journey through the forest by four men.
During a seamless series of 28 lifts, they do not let her feet touch the ground. It takes a while to realise why: she is wearing ballet shoes. When she is finally allowed to dismount, it is to balance on pointe on the bare ice. Even in a show as slick as this, the effect is a coup de théâtre. "I was so nervous at first," Sharoutenko says. "I had to practise for weeks on the floor before I dared to go on the ice."
Mercer cheerfully admits that it was a "rather sadistic" thing to demand of any skater - especially if the ice is at all wet. "It came about purely by chance. I was talking to Olga and she mentioned that as a child she had also taken ballet training. For her, it was a difficult decision: ‘Will I be a ballet dancer or an ice-skater?’ So, in a way, that sequence fulfils two things - it looks great on stage and it’s a performer’s dream come true. The skaters do tend to look at you strangely at first when you ask them to attempt something unfamiliar. But it does get worked out. They’re surprisingly trusting of me."
Even if they weren’t, you suspect that an innate competitiveness would drive this remarkable company to prove that it could do whatever was asked of it. Some of the performers used to skate against each other in championships - notably Olga Sharoutenko and Denis Samokhine, who plays the prince. That kind of rivalry does not disappear overnight.
You imagine that the absence of judges must be frustrating for them at times. After all, how many members of a typical audience know the difference between a salchow and a bielman? The temptation to judge their fellow skaters must be overwhelming at times. "It’s true," laughs Anton Klykov, whose stand-out performance as the courtier Catalabutte mixes a virtuoso display of back-flips and cartwheels with some well-judged comic acting.
"Sometimes you do find yourself watching from the wings, thinking, ‘That’s a 5.8’, or ‘I’d give that 5.7.’" He says this with the quiet confidence of a man who announces the arrival of the Black Fairy every night with a fiendishly difficult three and a half axel.
"Artistic performance has its own rewards," says Mercer. "But that competitive energy does give the show some of its magic. These are sportspeople, and that mentality is still deep-rooted. They’re always out there looking for the perfect six."
• The Sleeping Beauty on Ice is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, March 1 to 5, and at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, April 19 to 23. Book through Ticketmaster (0870 128 3556, www.ticketmaster.com)