When making up a shooting party, it's wise not to include those with advanced syphilis. In its tertiary stage the disease attacks the sensory nerves of the hands, and triggers can be pulled unknowingly. It was just such a discharge which, in 1888, caused Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary to be suspected of attempting to murder his father.
In Kenneth MacMillan's ballet the accident is the catalyst for Rudolf's final decline. Morphine addicted and politically compromised, he embarks on a reckless affair with 17-year-old Mary Vetsera, a diplomat's daughter who shares his death-wish and his taste for violent sex.
Making his debut as Rudolf, Carlos Acosta achieves a tortured pathos. He is less frenzied than other interpreters of the role, and through his desperate interactions with his mother (a chillingly evasive Isabel McMeekan), demonstrates that the roots of his self-destructive behaviour lie in his loveless upbringing. Acosta shows us the damaged child in the princely body, and his furious gaze and stiffly aristocratic stance remind us at every turn of his excruciating inability to assert an adult control over his life. Forced into an unwished-for marriage, his treatment of his wife (a brittle, blonde Natasha Oughtred) is brutal and cursory. The only semblance of peace he achieves is with the demi-mondaine Mitzi Caspar (Laura Morera, all come-to-bed eyes and languorous arabesques) who casually betrays him.
Leanne Benjamin's Mary Vetsera, by contrast, is truly lethal - a spoilt, affectless destroyer who wears her no-limits sexuality like a mink stole. At her first encounter with Rudolf, we see the calculation flicker across her sharp little features. Later, the connection made, she is ecstatic with the foreknowledge of the havoc she's going to cause. Mary is the archetypal MacMillan anti-heroine and Benjamin defines her through gorgeously expansive dancing and the steady accretion of physical detail: flutters of self-touching, liquescent back-bends, avid arms, coolly parted legs. I doubt there's a sexier spectacle on the London stage.
· In rep until June 16. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
