Pictures from an Exhibition

Is a work of art only as interesting as the sex-life of its creator? Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition is a tribute to his friend Viktor Hartmann, whose fascination with an emergent (and controversial) Russian national identity informs the distinctive cadences of the panoramic composition. But Daniel Kramer’s ambitious staging of Pictures from an Exhibition can’t seem to muster much interest in anything beyond the bedroom antics of the avant-garde.

The show’s obsession with the composer’s various sexual anguishes quite quickly becomes repetitive and reductive, imposing a constricting paraphrase of psychobabble upon potentially much more resonant material. There’s the inevitable quota of bared breasts and buttocks on display, a nursery nightmare of a testicle-chewing gnome, a coolly unattainable mother, and an ever-retreating array of same-sex lovers framed in doorways, but all the libidinous angst seems contrived, rather than deriving from the strident, haunting phrases of Mussorgsky’s vivid music.

In this dance-theatre collaboration between the Young Vic and Sadler’s Wells, the dancing seems sparse, often gimmicky, and occasionally ill-conceived. It’s tempting to discern the influence of too many inexperienced hands in the choreography’s superficial diffuseness. James Fenton’s text is sometimes striking, and sometimes emptily declamatory, while much swigging of vodka and bouts of delirium tremens become a fairly tiresome pretext for ever-more-frenetic narrative fragmentation.

There are some theatrically satisfying moments, like a vaudevillian Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, and a piano lesson tending towards chaos (and invasion by elephants), where music and physical performance seem to coalesce within a vigorous and mischievous company storytelling. Richard Hudson’s design, with its Alice-in-Wonderland oversized doors and inaccessible vistas, also achieves a playful fluidity that seems to elude other aspects of the production.

Pictures from an Exhibition is a show that leaves you humming Mussorgsky’s Promenade, but otherwise unchallenged and unenlightened. A bold and intriguing project has descended into an insubstantial and prurient biopic.