Former superstar dancer-turned-choreographer Peter Schaufuss admits there is a 'great challenge' in transforming a book or movie into a ballet. With Midnight Express, he appears to have bitten off more than he can chew.
Billy Hayes' autobiographical tale about the unending nightmare of life in a Turkish prison is a tour-de-force, wrenching the reader on a ride through paranoia, despair and abject terror. Alan Parker turned it into an eerie masterpiece on film, set to Giorgio Moroder's flights of synthesised fancy.
Schaufuss captures none of the darkness and filth of Hayes' odyssey, presenting us instead with an antiseptic vision where the prison bars are gleaming chrome and the inmates all wear Diesel jeans.
He says it stands for all the prisons we find ourselves trapped in by life. I say that's a cop-out. Hayes went through hell and Schaufuss has sold him short.
Part of the problem is his choice of leading man. At no point does Quang Van, as Hayes, truly engage the audience. If the piece is to overcome its uninspired and at times repetitive choreography, it requires a dancer who can transcend mediocre material to draw us into Hayes' world, to let us see through his eyes. Van just doesn't appear to have access to the emotional vocabulary needed to carry it off.
The music chops back and forth between Moroder and Mozart, which Schaufuss describes as a 'deliberate musical contrast'. At times this works well; on one or two occasions it is simply jarring. Moroder's music, especially the pulsing theme from the film's chase scene, is terrific on screen - a driving, hypnotic accompaniment to the cinematographer's bag of visual tricks. But the theatre is a very different medium, and at times the score threatens to overpower events on stage.