FAÇADE

Choreography: Sir Frederick Ashton
Premiered 26 April 1931, Cambridge Theatre, London

Façade is that very rarest of English creatures, an enduringly popular success and at the same time a definitively modern work of art. It began in the Chelsea home of the aristocratic and artistic Sitwell siblings, where the young William Walton was lodging. Walton (who had just been humiliatingly turned down by Diaghilev for a Ballets Russes commission, despite the Sitwells' enthusiastic promotion) composed a scintillating score of pastiche musical numbers to accompany Edith Sitwell's avant garde poems, recited through a megaphone from behind a surrealist front curtain.

Its Aeolian Hall premiere in 1923 was greeted with contemptuous derision, reinforced by Noel Coward's skit "The Swiss Family Whittlebot" in his popular revue London Calling. But in Frederick Ashton's choice of Walton's music for a ballet divertissement created for the Camargo Socety in 1931, Façade attained genuine popularity and has never looked back.

In that 1931 premiere, Alicia Markova danced the Polka, Lydia Lopokova doubled as the Milkmaid and the Tango dancer, whilst Ashton himself played the Dago. Façade's sophisticated wit caught the mood of the twenties; and its instant popularity brought it into the repertoires of Rambert's Ballet Club, the Vic-Wells Ballet (1935, with Fonteyn's Polka and Ashton's Dago leading the cast) and the Royal Ballet, from whose repertoire it is never absent long.

Ashton made various revisions over the years. A Country Dance was added in 1935 (and later dropped). The Foxtrot dates from 1940, when John Armstrong created new designs, after the original sets and costumes were lost in the Sadler's Wells Ballet's dramatic flight from the Nazi invasion of Holland. Following the adoption of Walton's Popular Song as the theme tune for the long-running British TV show "Face The Music", Façade was performed in 1972 at The Snape Maltings and Sadler's Wells with Peter Pears reciting the Sitwell poems.

But the ballet remains, intact and much-loved. Ashton's tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Bloomsbury Movement. Walton's knowing take on the popular songs and dances of the twenties. With a generous dash of genteel camp. A very English marriage of high art and sheer enjoyment.

©Tim Tubbs