A Single Man Ballet Review 4*
First came the novel, then the film, now Christopher Isherwood’s gay novel A Single Man becomes a ballet
Grief fractures you. And if it’s grief you can’t share with those around you, it becomes even more corrosive. Such is the grief afflicting George, the central character of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 gay novel, A Single Man, now turned into a deeply affecting ballet, which has just premiered at Manchester’s Aviva Studios as part of the Manchester International Festival.
George, a British middle-aged professor at a Los Angeles university in the early 1960s, is grieving for his long-term partner, Jim, who was killed in a car crash, at a time when, in the words of Jonathan Watkins, choreographer of the new ballet, “people didn’t even believe that two men could love each other, let alone feel this level of grief.”
So A Single Man is very much a ballet about grief; gay grief, all the more poignant for being forbidden, but ultimately universal grief – if you’ve experienced loss, this ballet will cut straight to your heart, regardless of who you are or who you love.
That it does so is due to a remarkable combination of creatives, led by two of the most charismatic dancers of their generation, former Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson, as George, and the versatile dancer and actor Jonathan Goddard as Jim. (Goddard and Watson will alternate in the role of George in the London run of A Single Man).
Ed Watson and Jonathan Goddard in A Single Man ©2025 Johan Persson
A third key element is the American-born Icelandic singer/songwriter John Grant, whose especially commissioned seven songs provide George’s inner monologue.
Jonathan Goddard talks about A Single Man
So while George’s body goes about his day through Chiara Stephenson’s set that cleverly frames home, classroom, the living room of his friend Charley, the beach bar where he first met Jim, every setting skilfully pointed up by Simisola Majekodunmi’s lighting, watching him from a raised platform within the neon outlines of a head, is Grant.
John Grant and Ed Watson in A Single Man ©2025 Johan Persson
His songs, in the style of 60s rock ballads, are complemented by Jasmin Kent Rodgman’s original score, jazzy at times, occasionally riffing on minimalist, sometimes just an atmospherically sustained note, performed by five musicians from the Manchester Collective sitting downstage left behind a translucent curtain.
Watkins choreographs the urgency and yearning of George and Jim’s encounters – the memory of Jim haunts George – in duets at once loving and tender, playful and deeply erotic, the two bodies intertwining in George’s eagerness to hold on to the past. Both compelling dancers, there is intense chemistry between Watson and Goddard.
A 13-strong ensemble, costumed by Oscar-winning Holly Waddington and Eleanor Bull, work hard doubling as the various characters of George’s day – his students, a pair of tennis players whose bodies catch George’s eye, a group of gym bunnies – and, kitted out in white unitards stained with splodges of colour, as manifestations of George’s inner turmoil. In a particularly effective sequence, they become the waves that surround and lift George when he goes for an impulsive midnight swim in the ocean.
The Royal Ballet principal character artist Kristen McNally is George’s flaky friend Charley, the only person he can talk to about Jim; their very drunken antics bring a brief moment of levity to George’s day.
Kristen McNally and Ed Watson in A Single Man ©2025 Johan Persson
And the Royal Ballet’s James Hay is excellent as Kevin, the perky student who somehow awakens in George the will to go on living.
At two hours including a long interval, A Single Man is a little uneven; and I feel its intensity would be better sustained at a shorter length without an interval; but I found the production stylish, its ideas interesting and its love duets truly powerful.
© Teresa Guerreiro
(Banner image credit: production image of A Single Man ©2025 Johan Persson)
A Single Man plays at Aviva Studios, Manchester, 2 – 6 July 2025. Tickets here
Jonathan Goddard dances George on 5 July and Jim in all other dates.
A Single Man is at the RBO Linbury 8 – 20 September 2025. Tickets and info here
Jonathan Goddard dances George on 9, 10,1 3, 17, 19 September and Jim on all other dates.