Northern Ballet’s Gentleman Jack – Review – Sheffield Lyceum Theatre

By Clare Jenkins, April 2026

Award-winning choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa has previously celebrated the lives of Frieda Kahlo, Coco Chanel and Maria Callas. Now she’s turned her attention to Anne Lister, the 19th Century Yorkshire landowner and convention-defying lesbian, whose life was celebrated seven years ago by Sally Wainwright’s acclaimed TV series, Gentleman Jack.

The result is another triumph for Northern Ballet, with compelling story-telling, powerfully hypnotic movement and mesmerising performances. And nowhere is it more magnetic than Gemma Coutts’ portrayal of the central character.

Onstage for almost the whole two hours, Coutts’ androgynous Lister is lithe and muscular, bursting with vigour, assertive, audacious, charismatic, occasionally vulnerable, even grief-stricken. From the moment she appears, boldly challenging the authority of wealthy industrialist Christopher Rawson (George Liang), she is out to show who’s boss, not just in business but also in matters of the heart and loins.

Every movement, every facial expression, is pitch-perfect, whether showing defiance, determination or desire. While her misogynistic fellow businessmen are dressed head to foot in grey, Lister’s tailcoats swish to reveal sassy sage-green linings. She also has a shoulder-shrugging, hat-flicking swagger which, together with a fine ability to manspread and the occasional conspiratorial glance towards the audience, show she’s not a woman to be messed with.

image: Tristram Kenton

“World of passion”

Her first love, Mariana (sensitively danced by Saeke Shirai), breaks her heart by yielding to convention and marrying a man, though not before some erotically-charged tabletop lovemaking. The couple’s limbs curve swan-like around each other, sometimes playfully, always sinuously. A bell normally used for summoning servants becomes a love-making tool, tenderly brushing down Mariana’s body. It’s in sharp contrast to Mariana’s duets with her husband, which are marked by stiffness and restraint.

Rejected – and physically attacked by a group of men -, Anne flees to Paris, where she discovers a world of passion and gender-defying liberalism far removed from the constraints and expectations of home, with its formal tea parties, corseted conventions and relentlessly ticking grandfather clock. Back in Halifax, she meets the woman who is to become her ‘wife’, Rawson’s niece Ann Walker. Skittishly portrayed by Rachael Gillespie, the younger woman is delighted to be the object of Lister’s desire, but apprehensive at what it entails.

Christopher Ash’s wuthering grey set includes movable bookcases that transform into video screens variously depicting countryside and woods, bird-filled skies and Regency-era stone villages and towns. There’s also a small treadmill which Lister sometimes uses to walk purposefully through the scenes.

image: Emily Nuttall

“Innovation”

As ever with Northern Ballet, the dancers astonish with the improbable things they can do with their bodies, from splits to arabesques to lifts – here with the extra innovation of women partnering women. Lister herself, like the men, dances in flat shoes throughout, until the final wedding scene where she and Ann, demurely veiled, dance their pas de deux on pointe.

Another striking touch is the Chorus of Words, whose costumes (body suits inscribed with mysterious scribblings, ink-blank gloves and socks) represent the code Lister devised to detail her sexual adventures in her diaries. As she obsessively waves her feather quill around in the air, they swirl around her, their movements almost hieroglyphic in style.

Peter Salem’s score – played live by the Northern Ballet Sinfonia under conductor Daniel Parkinson – combines folk melodies with more strident percussive beats, while brass accompanies the image of coalminers underground.

At the end, Lister, ever true to herself, is back on her treadmill, striding steadfastly and seductively towards us and into history.

Gentleman Jack is at Sheffield Lyceum until Saturday 4th April, then touring
Top image: Scott Salt

Clare Jenkins( Writer )

Clare’s dream is to live in a hotel suite, safe from the bother of boiler breakdowns and crashing computers. Thanks to her husband Stephen McClarence’s work as a national newspaper travel writer, she’s been lucky enough to stay at hotels across the UK, India and many other countries – and has loved (nearly) every minute. As a journalist herself, she was a regular contributor to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for over 20 years and has made features and documentaries for Radios 3 and 4. She’s also a former theatre reviewer for The Stage magazine and, with her husband, co-author of Teatime at Peggy’s: A Glimpse of Anglo-India.

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