A Month in the Country

One of Founder Choreographer Frederick Ashton’s final masterpieces before his passing in 1988, A Month in the Country premiered to great critical and audience acclaim in 1976. Ashton had wanted to adapt Ivan Turgenev’s play since the 1930s after seeing it at the Westminster Theatre, but this would only come to fruition forty years later. For Ashton’s ballet, John Lanchery’s arrangement of Fryderyk Chopin’s impassioned music provides the backdrop against which the dramatic action unfurls. Ashton stripped Turgenev’s tale of its extraneous details, boiling it down to its essential relationships which manifest in the ballet as various solos and pas de deux. In A Month in the Country, Ashton painted a stirring portrait of complex emotions as a household is interrupted by the arrival of dashing young tutor. The opening night featured a starry cast including Lynn Seymour, Alexander Grant, Wayne Sleep and Anthony Dowell among others.