Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet

Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London June 2025

Back in 1973, Pete Townshend and the group The Who released a rock opera about a restless youth searching for his identity amid Britain’s social upheavals and passing trends in the early 1960s. The double album, Quadrophenia, was a huge hit, as was another rock opera, Tommy, which The Who had produced four years earlier.

You might miss those heady days of new music and newsworthy fashion if you were around then, and they carry particular significance for Townshend. He says now that he wrote Quadrophenia “to find a way to help The Who to also look back ten years to where their story as rock stars began. In 1973 we were lost, and Quadrophenia helped us find our way.”

Its story and music focus on a moment in Britain’s cultural history when rival subcultures emerged from the working class, largely among young men. They identified themselves either as slick Mods—who sported sharp suits and ties, dug cool modern jazz, and rode Italian motor scooters—or as scruffy Rockers—who favored black leather, rock and roll, and heavy-duty motorcycles. Desperate to escape abuse at home and a dead-end job on an assembly line, the opera’s hero, Jimmy, joins the Mods, who introduce him to girls, drugs, companionship and violent brawls without resolving his emotional misery.

Transforming the album into dance was apparently Townshend’s idea. “Dance is perfect to express all this,” he has declared. So over four years, Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet developed through a collaboration between the experienced stage director Rob Ashford and the pop music choreographer Paul Roberts; the latter had three assistants with solid track records in contemporary dance. Rachel Fuller, Townshend’s wife, orchestrated his score, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it for the dance production.

You could call the result a labor of love, at least for the participants. Only nostalgia for a bygone era would assure two hours of anyone else’s interest in the characters or their sketchy circumstances.

To the viewers who didn’t already know the music, the score must have sounded pretty much the same throughout, relentlessly loud and lush with strings topped by solo riffs on brass or guitar. To those who didn’t already know the songs, the fact that their titles labeled each episode—blackouts separated the scenes—didn’t make up for the loss of the lyrics, which have been dropped.

Still, you got the general idea. When we first met Jimmy, a quartet of men in nifty tailored suits appeared behind him in a wave of overlapping images. Recurring constantly, these doppelgängers represented the conflicting aspects of his personality, the quad of the work’s title. On opening night, Curtis Angus, Dylan Jones, Seirian Griffiths and Will Bozier played the Tough Guy, the Lunatic, the Romantic and the Hypocrite respectively, adding considerable depth to Jimmy’s thinly drawn character.

Though the dramatic progression was too vague to follow, the remarkable dancers nailed the teenage angst and streetwise attitudes that motivate the story. Paris Fitzpatrick made an appealing Jimmy, wide-eyed in his eagerness for something he can’t define, and the ensemble carried the evening convincingly as angry rebels, cookie-cutter commuters, jittery adversaries, and stoned revelers.

Roberts’ gymnastic dance vocabulary leans heavily on high-flying leaps, long luscious extensions and dizzying turns, along with angular, pretzel-like lifts. Beyond repetitive, these moves seemed almost self-perpetuating until I realized that Roberts had to keep the cast dancing until each wordless song finally played itself out. At their most effective, in the edgy excitement of friends Twisting at a party or the frozen poses of gang warfare, the dances vibrated with what one ‘60s critic called “the feelings of thousands of pissed-off adolescents.”

Like the Mods and Rockers, The Who is gone but not forgotten. If you remember Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet once you’ve left the theatre, it will be for the dancing, which slams you with a passionate immediacy that has nothing to do with nostalgia.

At Sadler’s Wells until July 13 and at The Lowry, Manchester, July 15-19. See modballet.com