Gentleman Jack: Northern Ballet show is ‘sensuous’ and stylish

In her lifetime, Anne Lister was mocked for her masculine appearance and dress, and unkindly nicknamed Gentleman Jack, said Allan Radcliffe in The Times. But more than 180 years after her death, the Yorkshire landowner and polymath has “acquired the status of national treasure”. Her secret encrypted diaries, discovered in the 1980s, revealed that she’d had numerous same-sex affairs and a symbolic marriage to a woman – leading to her being described as the “first modern lesbian”.

A recent BBC television drama series based on her life introduced her story to a far wider audience. But Northern Ballet’s impressive new narrative ballet is “more than an attempt to ride the coat-tails of Lister’s celebrity”. Choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, it “sets out to break the mould of traditional gender roles in dance”; with ingenious and novel touches, and clear, compelling storytelling, it is a sensuous success.

Although its subject matter is “progressive”, this is a formally “conventional” work with a tight narrative, long arabesques and great fluency, said Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian. Think of it as an “accessible, stylish production that happens to put the love between two women (three, actually) centre stage”. Gemma Coutts is a self-confident Lister, with a top hat, a frock coat and a “cocky motif” – a flick of the hip and the leg. But we also see the character’s romantic side, not least in an “erotically charged pas de deux on a dining table” with her great love Mariana (Saeka Shirai). Coutts, Shirai, and Rachael Gillespie – who plays Lister’s future wife, Ann Walker – are strong actors as well as dancers, and vividly convey the drama of the tale.

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In truth, Lister’s is “not an obvious story to adapt”, said Holly Williams in The Telegraph. Her business interests included canals, railways, collieries and quarries; her story is also about being an outsider in the “boys’ club of business”. It’s tricky to fit fraught discussions about coal mines into a ballet, and fans of the TV show may miss its snappy dialogue. The evening is on far firmer ground when it comes to her love life. All told, this is a crisp, refreshing, contemporary ballet – and, at times, a “sexy delight”.