Deckchairs fly, arms clash, bodies launch into the air as mods and rockers engage in a fierce Brighton seafront battle. But in this east London dance studio – with Zaha Hadid’s Olympic swimming pool visible through the window – young performers in sports socks, joggers and baggy T-shirts are reimagining the Who’s seminal document of the mid-60s Quadrophenia as ballet.
Isn’t this 1973 album an unlikely subject for dance? We’ve recently had Black Sabbath: The Ballet, and Message in a Bottle set to Sting, so why not? After all, Quadrophenia is theatrical at its roots. “The closest thing to a grand opera I’ll ever write,” says the Who’s guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend. Set in 1965, the story of disaffected young mod Jimmy looking for meaning in life via music, amphetamines and aspirational tailoring became a cult 1979 film starring Phil Daniels, but a more recent incarnation was Classic Quadrophenia, a symphonic version of the album for orchestra and tenor Alfie Boe. It was when Townshend heard the instrumental version, orchestrated by the musician Rachel Fuller (also Townshend’s wife) that he said to her: “I think this would make a lovely ballet.”
A few years on, Fuller was composing a children’s ballet and met ex-Royal Ballet dancer Natalie Harrison; together a plan was hatched (Harrison is creative producer on the project). The person whose job it became to turn this much-loved piece of pop culture into dance, however, had barely heard of Quadrophenia. “I knew the film poster,” says Paul Roberts, a choreographer who has worked with Harry Styles, Spice Girls and numerous other pop luminaries. But the team quickly started workshopping ideas, drawing on classical, contemporary and commercial dance, and brought in Tony-, Emmy- and Olivier-winning director Rob Ashford, to help shape what Townshend calls “a compressed vision of what a lot of young men go through in their late teens and early 20s. This young guy who is bereft and lacks deep friendships and support and yet he feels part of this mod gang.”
It is 60 years since the famous beachfront clash, ancient history for the dancers who are in their 20s, such as Paris Fitzpatrick, 29, who plays Jimmy. Unlike the directionless Jimmy, Fitzpatrick has been training at performing arts school since the age of 12 and gone on to an award-winning dance career. Can he relate to these characters? “Disillusionment? We can all relate, I think,” he says. “Being a bit lost, the search for meaning, I’ve experienced a lot of that.” Harrison tells me that in discussions in the studio, the young cast ended up making parallels with TV series Adolescence, “the anger, confusion of being a young man, needing to belong”.
Down the corridor in the costume room, it turns out one thing the dancers are having trouble relating to is the tightness of the suits. “They normally wear triple XL,” laughs associate costume designer Natalie Pryce, amid the racks of Paul Smith shirts, vintage finds, polo shirts and parkas. Smith has designed the costumes, and Pryce and costume stylist Hannah Teare are putting together the wardrobe and adjusting garments for the needs of dancers. That means adding gussets under the arms and in the slim-cut trousers, accommodating dancers’ muscular thighs.
Vintage suits have “no bounce”, says Teare, no stretch in the fabric. They also have to double up on some items to take into account all the inevitable sweat. “You’ve got to allow for the first previews and press night, where everyone’s a bit more nervous,” says Pryce. Then you’ve got to get the details right, the correct width of lapel (narrow) and collar style (dagger), the kind of things that might pass some by “but a mod would know that another guy passing on the street was a mod”, says Teare. There are hairstyles to think about, too. A lot of the boys are reluctant to grow out their fades, says Pryce, but others are getting in the spirit. (And since there’s an Oasis reunion about to happen, they might find themselves at the height of fashion.)
“The look was the manifesto,” says Townshend of the mod movement. And the suits, in fact, were instrumental in shaping the actual dancing the mods did in the 60s (“Pete got up and showed us some moves,” says Roberts. “There’s one where he flicks his leg out, we’ve stolen that.”) “Because they invested so much into what they were wearing, it’s very poised, very collected, super minimal,” Roberts demonstrates a subtle groove. “You want to keep your tie straight, your shirt tails tucked in,” adds Ashford, and God forbid you mess up your hair. But there was an edge, a sense of the caged animal about it. The energy inside that composure was “scruffy and hectic”, says Roberts, “wild and messy energy contained in a sort of box of self-consciousness” is how Fitzpatrick puts it. “About as far from classical ballet as you can get.”
Everyone on the production raves about Fitzpatrick as Jimmy (he’s best known for dancing the lead in Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet). “He has this fragility, this rawness to him,” says Roberts. It’s the lost boy look in his deep brown eyes. In the show, four other dancers embody the four facets of Jimmy’s personality that he’s grappling with – the Romantic, the Hypocrite, the Tough Guy, the Lunatic – trying to make sense of who he is. Also recently added to the cast is Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball, as Godfather. Harrison tells me she was watching him in rehearsal leaping around the room. “It was electric,” she says. “You know how suddenly the stars align? It was like Pete’s guitar playing happening as a full-body experience.”
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Fuller has written the scenario based on Townshend’s original liner notes (rather than a rehash of the film) and without lyrics or text; making sure the storytelling is clear was paramount for her: “I’ve been to a few dance things, and I’m like: this is great but I’ve literally got no idea what’s going on.” Never being much of a dance person in the past, “what surprised me is that I’ve been able to make a real connection with it,” she says. Townshend already liked dance. “I’m a big fan of ballet. I go quite a lot,” he says. He talks about a scene between Jimmy’s troubled parents. “When they move together it’s absolutely powerful and poignant. You couldn’t do it with words.”
When Townshend first saw some of the movement Roberts had made to his music, “I was struck by the fact that I was being drawn back to my mid-20s by these boys, who had a physical way of expressing the missing lyrics. It felt like it was drawn from deep inside these young dancers. And I found it incredibly moving.” The 1960s was a different world, the inheritance of the postwar generation and the heralding of huge social change. “But it became clear there was a link between the kids that I grew up with and the similar issues, frustrations, difficulties that young men are facing today,” says Townshend. “The world is in a dangerous place at the moment.”
Fuller was determined that the ballet shouldn’t be set in the modern day, but in a way, says Townshend, that’s what’s happening. “It’s being brought into the modern day by the dancers. There are a couple of times when I’ve had tears in my eyes,” he says. “And that’s not because I’m listening to my own music,” he smiles, “it’s because it feels like it belongs to this new gang.”
There’s so much mythology around the mod movement. “The most dramatic pictures taken in the beach fights? The press set it up,” says Townshend. “Got a couple of rockers to jump off [the prom]. And according to a few of my mates from the day, they were paid 10 quid to smash up some deckchairs. Most of the mods didn’t want to muck up their clothes fighting.” And the movement itself was transitory. “It was very, very strong and very, very powerful when it was there,” says Townshend. “But it only lasted about two and a half years.” Quadrophenia, by contrast, is still thriving.
Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet is at Theatre Royal, Plymouth, Wednesday to 1 June; touring to 19 July.
