Un Unerring Eye for the Achilles Heel : SHADOWPLAY: The Life of Antony Tudor <i> By Donna Perlmutter (Viking: $24.95; 420 pp.) </i>

A haze of mystery and speculation always has surrounded the late, great British-born choreographer, Antony Tudor. At least four of his ballets are among the century’s undisputed masterpieces: “Jardin aux Lilas” (1936) and “Dark Elegies” (1937), both made for England’s pioneering little Ballet Club (later the Ballet Rambert), and “Pillar of Fire” (1942) and “Romeo and Juliet” (1943), choreographed in America for Ballet Theatre.

In these and others of his works, he transformed the ballet vocabulary by his gift for expressive gesture and form, by his unusual musicality and sense of phrasing, by his vision of pointework more as emotional emphasis than as display.

However, in England between 1931 and 1939, he was responsible for 16 ballets (plus choreography for 16 operas, four plays, a revue, a film and 19 BBC television shows), while in the 47 years between 1940 and his death in 1987, he choreographed only 34 more ballets, eight of which were made for his students in the Dance Division of the Juilliard School of Music. It might be inferred that his genius atrophied, or that the conditions of his life stranded creativity.

As Donna Perlmutter points out in “Shadowplay: The Life of Antony Tudor,” the choreographer’s behavior also mystified and dismayed colleagues. The same man who moved out of his apartment temporarily because he suspected that old friends didn’t have the money for a hotel, who frequently signed his letters with little flurries of hearts, could also--especially during his years in America--treat associates with witty malice.

Dancers in particular he goaded mercilessly, ostensibly in the interest of getting sensitive performances out of them. He ordered the faithful Sallie Wilson (ultimately one of the greatest interpreters of the repressed Hagar in “Pillar of Fire”) to lose her virginity and then gave a dinner party to celebrate. His eye for the Achilles heel was unerring. To the young Alicia Alonso, sensitive about her lack of schooling, he said, “Very savage, very primitive. You should try to be more educated.”

In “Shadowplay,” Perlmutter attempts to understand some of the contradictions in Tudor’s character and career. Sadly, by the time she began work, Tudor was dead; so was his most important ballerina, Nora Kaye. Hugh Laing--Tudor’s lover of many years, his leading dancer, a spark to his creativity, and his cross to bear--had retreated into rage and pain. But good journalist that she is, Perlmutter built her text on memories and observations of many people who came into contact with Tudor over the years.

As a journalist, Perlmutter also has a flair for the colorful anecdote, the lively turn of phrase (Laing emerges from an enjoyable skirmish with Ballet Club director Marie Rambert like “a sleek, wetted-down panther”), and for building drama into her narrative. The book opens with a vivid account of the occasion when Tudor received a Kennedy Center award. Why, asks Perlmutter, was Laing not at his side? In the last chapter, she finally answers her question: Laing, the frequent victimizer, is yet again denying Tudor complete satisfaction.

The book certainly holds the reader’s attention, revealing events and intriguing details of the choreographer’s life and shedding light on his strange and troubled character. However--and this is one of the book’s major flaws--”Shadowplay” offers little analysis of Tudor’s choreographic style or his contributions to ballet, little descriptive material on the dances. Instead, Perlmutter, perhaps influenced by Tudor’s own researches into Freud, probes his ballets for their relationship to his psyche as she divines it.

Tudor once said that all his characters were part of himself. Perlmutter goes further, equating the stoical, mature male role that Tudor played in a few of his own ballets with his “ego ideal,” then saying that Hagar in “Pillar of Fire” “clearly represents” Tudor; misleadingly comparing the hopeless love of Caroline in “Jardin aux Lilas” with Tudor’s inability to “marry” Laing; seeing Gala Performance’s hilarious parodies of an Italian, a French and a Russian ballerina as indicative of “Tudor’s world as a matriarchy.” Not only is this psychoanalytic theorizing no substitute for deeper insights into the ballets, it inadvertently reduces them to Rorschach tests.

Perlmutter occasionally is prone to exaggeration. Her presentation of Laing-the-dancer as one “empowered to rub the golden lamp and drag brilliant ballets from the Tudor genie” further undermines the picture of a great choreographer that she has been trying to build up. To dismiss many ballets as “hippety-hop rituals” or to claim that Tudor “transformed ballet from a lambent romanticism to the equivalent of a detailed twentieth-century novel,” while his peer Frederick Ashton was “the master of poetic valentines and witty fripperies,” is misinterpreting dance history.

Although Tudor, the son of a shop owner, matter-of-factly characterized himself as coming from a “middle-class, petit bourgeois background,” Perlmutter, evidently misunderstanding the arcane distinctions of the British class system, persists in reasoning as if a large working-class chip on his shoulder were a major contributor to his debilitating self-doubt.

The book contains errors that careful copy editing should have caught. Tudor, for example, can’t have been influenced by Nijinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps,” since he was 5 at the time of its only performances in England. The bustle was not worn in 1908. Luise Rainer never made a film called “Masquerade.” The Hindu deity Shiva is male and not to be linked with Tudor “goddesses” Anna Pavlova and Olga Spessivtseva as sources for the “celestial” in “Shadowplay” (made by Tudor for the Royal Ballet in 1967). Editorial eyes even missed the beguiling error in a remark about the young Nureyev’s presence in the Royal Ballet being resented by “the recumbent male principals.”

Searching the end notes for sources of the many intriguing and provocative quotes can be frustrating. Chapter 23, for instance, contains about 19 quotations, of which only nine are referenced. Only one source is listed for Chapter 26, while more than 20 quotations appear in the next.

Wisely, Perlmutter attempts no single explanation for Tudor’s decline, but her sad and gripping tale brings out many contributory factors: less-than-ideal working conditions, power structures, Laing’s destructive-supportive shifts, the unavailability of trusted dancers, Tudor’s perverse nature, and what might be an imposter complex of large proportions. Certainly the more Tudor was praised as the Chekhov of dance, the more dauntingly ambitious grew his major projects and the more elusive of success. The little ballets for Juilliard students, expertly made as they were, seemed counterbalancing exercises in humility.

Yet “Shadowplay” or the ravishingly lyrical “The Leaves Are Fading,” which he made for American Ballet Theatre in 1975, showed that his gift for creating wonderful, emotion-propelled dancing never deserted him.