Review: BLACK SABBATH - THE BALLET, Sadler's Wells

Despite the enticing cultural dissonance of its title, Black Sabbath – The Ballet is, by definition, a terrible idea. It is the conceptual equivalent of putting a tuxedo on a pit bull, or hiring Prince Andrew as your PR manager. This is what happens when the civic-minded folk at a major arts company, having dutifully listened to enough AC/DC to establish their street cred, decide they can bottle the anarchic essence of heavy metal and sell it in three-act bottles to those living off the ever-sweet smell of nostalgia and the kind of people who buy all their concert T-shirts from Vinted.

The fact that this particular brand of aesthetic vandalism was undertaken by the Birmingham Royal Ballet, under the direction of Carlos Acosta, could be either a cynical commercial exercise or a profound act of civic self-flagellation. Here is the city’s top-tier ballet company attempting to make peace with the city's biggest, loudest cultural export. The genius of Black Sabbath, born in the industrial grime of late Sixties Birmingham, was never sophistication; it was brute, undeniable, revolutionary noise. It was the sound of the modern world waving goodbye to hippy dreams and flower power as it collapsed into a pile of power chords and fear. It was the sound of a generation realising that the future looked exactly as grim as the present.

To be fair, turning ye olde back catalogues into modern dance shows is always a tricky business. Kate Prince’s fantastic Message In A Bottle built on Sting’s dinner party muzak to create a blisteringly powerful work on war, immigration and the power of love; on the flipside, Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet barely got our Vespas revving while “Hallelujah!” wasn’t exactly the word on my lips by the end of Dance Me - Music By Leonard Cohen (at least not in the way the director intended). 

Lead singer Ozzy Osbourne will always be remembered as the epitome of glorious, drunken chaos and, with his epic final bow and his death soon after still visible in the rear view mirror, this production which debuted in 2023 now takes on an unintentional new timbre. What was meant to be a celebration of the region’s best known band (sorry, Duran Duran) is instead transformed into a funereal, overly tidy memorial service for a life defined by glorious messiness. The prospective contrast between Ozzy’s legacy of unpredictable lunacy and the highly predictable structure of a three-act ballet quickly goes from enticing to enervating.

And yet, there I sat, watching a troupe of unnervingly fit people in expensive tights attempt to pirouette their way through the apocalypse. It felt like watching an intellectual trying to explain a joke; the moment you analyse the mechanism, the entire chaotic pleasure evaporates. Mercifully there was no sign of the oversized Stonehenge prop wickedly parodied by Spınal Tap and recently re-mocked by the band and Elton John; Acosta and his team may not have quite got what Black Sabbath were about but at least they don’t see them as vintage punchlines for easy gags.

Perhaps as a laudable attempt to highlight those working beyond the bright lights of Broadway and the West End, the most obvious structural flaw here is Acosta’s decision to hire three different choreographers (Cuban Raúl Reinoso, Brazilian Cassi Abranches and Swede Pontus Lidberg). When you hand the primal, singular vision of four working-class lads who invented an entire musical genre out of fuzz and fury over to three separate, geographically diverse artistic voices, you end up with not a unified vision but instead this messy trio of rock-flecked reflections on classical dance bereft of any echoes of the band’s proletarian and pagan leanings. Worst of all, nowhere is the kind of sustained physical and musical intensity that Hofesh Shechter or Wayne MacGregor could knock out in their sleep. 

Meanwhile, the audience is a bewildering mix of styles and influences: crusty rockers in faded tour shirts queue up with beers in hand alongside modish youngsters with their thick programmes tucked away in Daunt Books totes. Both demographics seem eager to experience something "different", albeit with caveats: the rockers are probably looking forward to a quirky immersion in the seminal tracks but quietly worried about the imminent lack of volume, while the Daunt crowd – boasting rock couture stretching all the way back to Nirvana — likely await clever theatrical irony that never quite materialises. They both got the committee’s idea of different: a polite, expensive form of cultural tourism.

Then there’s the music, orchestrated by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, under the guidance of lead composer Christopher Austin. The score is a study in sonic gentrification. We get rousing, stirring versions of their best known hits (“War Pigs”, “Paranoid”, “Iron Man” and “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”) that, against all odds, occasionally tickled the radio playlists. Too often, though, we are forced to endure Austin’s aural banality or the more laidback album fillers (“Solitude”, “Orchid”, “Laguna Sunrise” and “Planet Caravan”). Where was the grinding savagery the Sabbath are best known for? I wanted the sound of a factory press slicing off Iommi’s fingertips, and instead I got elevator music and the gentle rustle of a programme. 

The first act (Reinoso’s “Heavy Metal Ballet”) at least starts promisingly, with a glorious squeal of feedback – the sound of an artist whose amp budget is too low, amplified by an orchestra whose budget is clearly much higher. This is followed by the appearance of the "guitar spirit" (Marc Hayward), a bloke with flowing chestnut hair as long as a Tony Iommi guitar solo.

Dressed in a leather jacket, tight denim jeans and snappy boots all in goth black, Hayward  fingers his crotch-high axe as he holds it in the traditional "penis extension” style. It’s a high-camp vision of rock mythology surrounded by the crisp, clean lines of dancers who have never actually had to lug an amplifier up three flights of stairs in their life. A supremely sensuous sequence sees Yaoqian Shang and Javier Rojas spend several minutes joined in an unbroken kiss as they move around each other and the stage; spectacular to watch but an early argument for the view that this show could have been retitled “Black Sabbath vs Ballet”.

Act Two (Abranches’ “The Band”) opens with another genuinely promising audio cue: the chilling sounds of rain and the tolling of a distant bell from the beginning of early song "Black Sabbath" (arguably the first heavy metal song committed to record) as the dancers enter. They initially abandon the cute formations seen in the previous act and, instead, artfully abandon themselves to the music, thrashing and writhing with what appears to be genuine, if fleeting, passion. Depending on your view of Sabbath, this section resembles every one of their songs (either a repetitive number lasting too long or a life-affirming blast over too quickly) before more traditional choreography slides into place. It's a momentary glimpse into the anarchy the show could and should have fully embraced before it retreated back into the safety of the repertoire.

This act’s USP is the use of voiceovers from the founding band members plus manager Sharon Osbourne. They help pull the focus away from the self-serious choreography and bring this hallowed bunch of misfits to life more than anything else with its many genuinely grubby tales of drugs, sex, and leather fingertips. The authentic, slurred accounts of their chaotic lives break through the sophisticated stylings of the ballet and rescue the evening from becoming that most pointless of exercises: a rock hagiography. This small injection of reality, juxtaposed with the tidy dancing, is the most authentic (and, consequently, emotional) moment of the entire production.

Act Three (Lidberg’s “Everybody is a Fan”), predictably, suffers the worst from this terminal lack of menace, its saving grace a magnificent stage prop. An impressive silver statue — an upturned car with the driver's side door open and no driver in sight (insert metaphor here, it seems to shout), beneath the iconic Black Sabbath devil symbol — is genuinely impressive. It acts as a physical emblem of a band hellbent on an erratic trajectory defined by speed, consumption and near-misses. It was, however, the only impressive thing about an act which revisits the "guitar spirit" and needs an encore from the 77-year-old Iommi himself (attached to the show as its “music consultant”) to make it in any way memorable. The only thing worse than high art attempting to interpret low art is when high art requires the low artist to personally step in and save the entire affair from intellectual self-parody. The final, sober conclusion is that perhaps no amount of beautiful dancing can capture the essence of a band whose very spirit was about ignoring the classic notion of beauty, throwing two fingers up to the establishment and destroying the status quo.

The polite soundtrack and pristine technique exacerbates the central, unavoidable disconnect. There’s the overall hard rock theme and the revolutionary nature of the band on one hand, and on the other, choreography that is beautiful, technically impeccable, but hardly groundshaking. These dancers could fly, twist, and glide with physics-defying grace, but they never once looked dangerous.

Black Sabbath is a band that taught a generation how to embrace their outsider status; this ballet sometimes feels like a group hug on an office day out. As so little of the back catalogue is actually used and the choreography is generally unspecific to the source material, it wouldn’t be too difficult to see this show repurposed for other bands: substitute the music for Iron Maiden's dramatic power metal, or even go as far as Coldplay's stadium anthems, and the performance would require only tweaks to the staging and lighting cues. It is essentially a show about motion, not menace.

Any show related to Black Sabbath should feel like a punch to the solar plexus. The very Sabbath season of Halloween is coming up but, as amply proven here, that’s not enough of a reason to apply a defibrillator to their back catalogue in this manner. This is an undoubtedly well-executed, aesthetically pleasing exploration of the dark side, which, as any connoisseur of darkness will tell you, is a fundamentally worthless enterprise. It’s all well and good to challenge the stereotype of heavy metal but, with about half the songs expressing the softer side of the band, this could hardly be called a fair representation of the patron saints of hotel room destruction.

Black Sabbath - The Ballet continues at Sadler’s Wells until Saturday October 25 before going onto the Edinburgh Festival Theatre (30 October - 1 November).