Macaulay on a Theatre Closure, Ashton Revivals and Horváth

The Gate Theatre announced its closure earlier this month. Alastair Macaulay, writing as critic in residence, concedes the Gate "had not been an important part of London theatre at any time this century," but pays tribute to how intensely it mattered in the 1990s, when, in his judgement, "for a few years the Gate truly was doing the best work in all of London theatre."

The theatre introduced him, in riveting productions, to masterpieces by Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Ödön von Horváth, and staged Euripides plays he had never expected to see onstage. Directors Stephen Daldry, Laurence Boswell and Katie Mitchell made superlative use of the limited space. Jude Law and Sophie Okonedo gave some of their earliest important performances there; Paola Dionisotti, Peter Eyre and Barbara Flynn did lasting work.

Ashton Rediscovered: Ondine

Frederick Ashton, whom Macaulay calls Britain's greatest choreographer, died in 1988. On Sunday 20 September, the Ashton Foundation's Ashton Rediscovered series at the Royal Ballet School turned to his fourth and final three-act ballet, Ondine (1958), set to a commissioned score by Hans Werner Henze. Notator-régisseur Grant Coyle and coach Edward Watson rehearsed scenes from Acts One and Three with young Royal Ballet soloists Marianna Tsembenhoi, who is Ukrainian, and Leo Dixon in the title roles.

The Henze score, once found difficult, "today sounds not just unchallenging but importantly neo-Romantic," Macaulay writes. Coyle and Watson remarked on the young dancers' high musicality: Tsembenhoi, they observed, can negotiate modernist music with far greater ease than most dancers of the last century. Throughout, she and Dixon showed "the kind of fresh talent and theatricality that brings Ashton choreography into keen new life."

Macaulay notes that Ashton ballets nobody expected to see again — the three-act Sylvia (1952) and the one-act Marguerite and Armand (1963) — have been danced this century by companies from Buenos Aires to St Petersburg.

Richard Alston's funeral

The choreographer Richard Alston died on 7 September, aged seventy-seven, after a prolific, multi-award-winning career. In 1982 Macaulay had called him "Ashton's heir"; he ranks Alston, after Ashton, as the finest British choreographer. His funeral took place on Wednesday 23 September, "a wonderfully touching celebration." In a historic moment, Alston's first muse and closest friend, the choreographer Siobhan (Sue) Davies, now in her late seventies, showed two phrases from the 1978 duet he made for them in Doublework. A Richard Alston Foundation exists, but Macaulay argues the British modern-dance scene "will have to change hugely" before Alston's choreography receives the revivals it deserves.

Cunningham at Oxford

On Thursday 24 September, Macaulay watched Cunningham alumna Jeannie Steele coach teachers at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda's College, Oxford, for Dansox, on teaching Cunningham technique. A sold-out public event followed on Saturday 26 September. Steele argued that Cunningham's teaching will prove his greatest legacy, quoting Cunningham himself: the larger point of technique is that, while training the body, you release the spirit.

Leonskaja at Wigmore Hall

The Georgian-born, Austrian-naturalised pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja, now eighty, played Schubert at the Wigmore Hall on Tuesday 22 September: the Sonata in B, D575; the Four Impromptus, D935; and the Sonata in D, D850. Macaulay, hearing her for the third time this year, describes the visible current of motion "like thick cream, from Leonskaja's shoulders to her fingers." She has "power, force, and weight — and many shades of delicacy"; most of the time she is "like a dreaming Titan — though in the first impromptu the Titan seemed thrillingly awake."

Judgment Day at the Old Red Lion

Matilda Ziegler, who played Anna in Stephen Daldry's 1989 UK premiere of von Horváth's Judgment Day at the Old Red Lion, has founded the company Fright Train and returned to the same play as director — with her daughter, Faye Ziegler, now playing Anna. The production, using minimal scenery and fourteen actors in the Islington pub theatre's three-row auditorium, "vividly shows how von Horváth's play takes on expressionistic tones."

The 1937 play centres on station master Hudetz, whose kiss with Anna makes him miss a signal; eighteen people die in the crash that follows. Town opinion absolves him, Anna perjures herself, and Frau Hudetz's truthful testimony is disbelieved — until guilt transforms everyone.

Ziegler's staging is "at its most audacious" in a ghost scene in which Hudetz (Craig Hamilton) is haunted by the crash victims — "a nightmare, exaggerated but entirely persuasive." One flaw: most actors mispronounce "Fräulein." Macaulay closes with Marlowe: the production illustrates "infinite riches in a little room" — and, he notes, could easily transfer to a larger venue.