When Australian Ballet first brought their Swan Lake to London, its portrait of a dysfunctional royal marriage seemed to be lifted straight from the recent British past. On a second viewing, though, Graeme Murphy’s choreography is informed less by Charles, Camilla and Di than by another 19th-century classic, Giselle. It’s startling, in fact, how similar the stories are as the guileless Odette, discovering that her husband Siegfried is in love with the worldly Baroness von Rothbart, is driven mad with grief and dies.
If Murphy’s dramatic template is classical, he works hard to give his characters a more contemporary edge. The Queen (a marvellously gimlet-eyed Shane Carroll) is given a proper role as the cynical force behind court politics. Odette’s porcelain prettiness develops a feral poetry, as her emotions unravel into a slippery mercurial wildness, and Murphy is assiduous in layering degrees of complexity behind the Baroness’s wicked manipulations. As a woman gambling with her position and her heart, she’s ultimately powerless against the Prince’s whims and it’s only a shame that Murphy doesn’t push this to its logical conclusion and make Siegfried a more blatantly two-timing scumbag.
He could have been bolder, too, in his editing. Stretching the ballet to four acts creates too many longueurs, in which the storyline falters and the choreography (at times forced and unmusical) looks exposed. But the evening is carried by its principals, especially Amber Scott, whose Odette is a marvel of delicately poised contradictions.
• At Coliseum, London, until 16 July. Box office: 020-7845 9300.
