Twenty-four-year-old Robert Helpmann made a mixed impression when he auditioned for Sadlers Wells in 1933, but for Ninette de Valois, the balance came up on the credit side. Although technically weak, the dancer had a quicksilver quality that appealed, and when he made his first entrance into the classroom, she recorded, ‘I felt that something quite important had happened’ (quoted on p. 46). On the centenary of Helpmann's birth in 1909, one may start to wonder what might become of him if he were to start his career today. Firing on all systems, with a miscellaneous, ill-focused talent and massive audience appeal, I suspect he would turn up as a contestant on one of the widespread television talent shows, where he would be faulted by the judging panel for overindulgence and for technical blunders, but praised for his strong partnering, fluid line and never-failing entertainment value.

Yet might not this theatrically voracious figure, ‘a fiend’ for audience attention from the time he made his concert hall debut in a transvestite fairy act at the age of seven, have cut a swathe through whatever no-go areas he encountered, to catch the waves of cultural change across a new century? Bemrose's biography charts Helpmann's extraordinary ride as he surfed the tides of twentieth-century modernism. It is an amazing life story, in which the arc of the character takes one mid-flight twist after another. Just keeping up with it in a lucid, well-documented account is an achievement that will make this a valuable reference work for theatre and dance scholars. All the same, this book is too much under the spell of its mesmeric subject. Helpmann is a profoundly contradictory figure, an exhibitionist and self-promoter with mardi-gras propensities, but he is also a subtle, endlessly resourceful and daring innovator. These contradictions would have deserved more exploration.