The storytelling in Cranko's 1965 ballet Onegin is an odd mix of old-fashioned melodrama and psychological acuity. As its four leading lovers are thrust from romantic comedy into grown-up tragedy, they have to make sense of choreography that veers between feverish ranting and deeply mined feeling. Out of Monday's cast it was Mara Galeazzi, standing in for an injured Tamara Rojo as Tatiana, who found the most triumphantly coherent route through.
Galeazzi is one of those dancers whose successes you cannot predict. Her technique is never so sure that she can sail through the classics with brilliant ease, yet it is shaped by surprisingly expressive quirks and powered by a resolute private intelligence. As the teenage Tatiana her movements are gauche and mannered, almost to the point where the dancer's first-night nerves merge with the anxiety of the character. But this portrayal contains hints of the intemperate ardour seething beneath Tatiana's schoolgirl demeanour, and this becomes fiercely apparent in the dream pas de deux with Onegin. Adam Cooper, a responsive partner even when his technique is a little erratic, here gives Galeazzi generous space and support with which to let fly Tatiana's adolescent passions. In the climactic lift sequence where she flares ecstatically around his neck, Galeazzi, like her character, looks as if she is hurling her heart at the world.
It is this visceral ferocity that gives depth to Tatiana's histrionics in the duel scene and credibility to her subsequent happy marriage to Prince Gremin (danced by the excellent Christopher Saunders). Her duet with the latter implies far more than wifely compliance, confirming early hints that Galeazzi's Tatiana moves from deep erotic impulses. But when she dances again with Onegin the drama of sexual need turns raw. Cooper is actually far more commanding as the younger, cynical Onegin than as the desperate lover, and it is in Galeazzi's dancing that we truly register the churning of the lovers' guts and the scorched sensitivity of their nerve endings. When Tatiana finally sends Onegin packing, the hysterical tremors that agitate Galeazzi's empty arms are shocking. We know that this is a Tatiana who will never find peace again.
The advertised Olga, Alina Cojocaru, had fallen victim to end-of-season injury, but her replacement Jane Burn proved less of a revelation. Burn is a thinking dancer and I like the way she allows Olga to exercise her flirtatious caprices without appearing girlishly empty-headed. But the role is a difficult dancing one and Burn, like her partner Ivan Putrov as Lensky, lacks the fluency to make it sing.
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