Christopher Gable
'An English Nureyev?' Well, as it turned out, no - but this newspaper headline seemed a very reasonable proposition in 1964. The dancer in question was Christopher Gable. He was 24 at the time, seven years in to his Royal Ballet career, and looked set to lead the company for the next decade. But less than three years later he had given up dancing for good. Gable appeared with both the Covent Garden and the Sadler's Wells Opera Ballets before being taken into the touring Royal Ballet company. He quickly became known - 'Who's that blond boy in the corps de ballet?' - and got his first big chance in 1960, partnering Lynn Seymour in Macmillan's The Invitation: no-one since has caught so exactly the air of rather clumsy youthful innocence. He danced again with Seymour a few months later in the first performance of Ashton's Two Pigeons, and as well as all the usual Princes, he was one of the best ever as Colas in Fille mal Gardée. By the time Gable moved to Covent Garden, Nureyev had arrived, and the article quoted above talks of what Gable was learning from the Russian star, to add to his own already considerable technique and dramatic sense. The partnership with Seymour had flourished, and Macmillan chose the two of them for the leading roles in his first full length work, Romeo and Juliet. Both Gable and Seymour became so closely involved in the creation of the new ballet that it was a crushing blow to both of them, and to Macmillan, when the Opera House Board insisted that Fonteyn and Nureyev should dance the first night. Although they had an immense success when their turn came, and and have long been recognised as the inspirations for the roles, it seems that neither of them has ever forgiven this slight - made worse in Seymour's case by the fact that she had an abortion rather than lose the role. Gable's current 'Who's Who' entry simply says that he created the role of Romeo. Gable left the Royal Ballet in in January 1967. He had always intended to turn to acting when he reached 40, but now realised that might be too late; and a recurrent problem with his feet, which caused him a lot of pain, helped the decision. He acted both on the stage and in films before returning to the dance world to found and direct the Central School of Ballet. In 1987 he became the director of Northern Ballet Theatre, and turned to choreography in recent years; but that's another story. By the time he left it was apparent that in David Wall and Anthony Dowell the Royal Ballet had a new generation of potential leaders; Gable had paved the way for them by proving it was possible for an English dancer to combine the technique and the interpretation to make a star. Christopher Gable died in 1998. {top}
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