When the BalletBoyz, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, recently filmed the Royal Ballet’s version of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet for cinema and TV release, they subtitled it “Beyond Words”. Which is a characteristically clever bit of marketing, because the strange thing about ballet is that it really can, at its very best, reach the parts other arts do not even begin to touch.
Take last Saturday’s performance, by the Royal Ballet again, of John Cranko’s Onegin. On the surface, Pushkin’s masterly narrative poem is a strange choice for a dance treatment. It is all about the words, the rhythm and the heft of them, their subtle, enticing shape – and its plot pivots around two critical letters.
One is sent by the young, dreamy country girl Tatiana to the smouldering city sophisticate Onegin. His rejection of the love it contains triggers a duel and tragedy. The second is sent by Onegin himself, many years later, when he returns to St Petersburg after a wasted life, and once again meets Tatiana, now married and a sophisticated and beautiful society matron. He longs to win her back – and sends her a letter pleading for her love. She rejects him, even though she still loves him, choosing honour and loyalty over passion.
There are a lot of words in there. But the brilliance of Cranko’s balletic adaptation (created in 1965, then revised two years later) is that it turns them into scenes of pure and communicative dance. With the help of Jürgen Rose’s evocative designs, which move from the lime green and russet of Tatiana’s country home to the lush reds and pinks of a high society soiree, and a score stitched together from Tchaikovsky pieces by Kurt-Heinz Stolze, Cranko conjures an entire world.
Some of his effects are strongly expressionistic. When Tatiana writes to Onegin, she dreams him into being; he enters her room and her imagination through a mirror. When Onegin and his friend, the poet Lensky, fight a duel, Tatiana and her sister Olga try to intervene in clinging arabesques and rapid jumps, smothering Lensky’s body with their despair. Other ideas are more naturalistic: the gentle expansiveness of the love duet between Olga and Lensky, and the serene beauty of Tatiana’s own pas de deux with her husband, Gremin, are satisfying depictions of requited love, content in its own world. Through it all, the corps de ballet skips and jumps, using conventional balletic language to frame the psychodramas unfolding at the story’s heart.
To make its mark, though, Onegin needs performances as full of understanding as the choreography. On Saturday night it got them. Natalia Osipova is a dream of a Tatiana, plunging deep into her Russian soul. She marks each stage of the character’s development with a performance simultaneously full of detail and abandon; her final desolation when she pushes Onegin away as he flings himself repeatedly in a curl around her body is heartbreaking.
As Onegin, Reece Clarke, who at 24 has only just been promoted to first soloist, acquits himself well in a part that perhaps has more gravitas than he can currently summon. But he partners Osipova strongly, never interrupting the fevered flow of the dream sequence by making any of its high lifts look difficult. He also etches his own sharp lines powerfully across the stage, with refined jumps and ferocious pirouettes.
Olga and Lensky are equally well drawn and well danced. Matthew Ball brings to the hot-blooded poet a joy in his love for Francesca Hayward’s airy Olga that explains exactly why he reacts so strongly when she flirts with another man; as they dance together their bodies seem to curve with the force of their love. His melancholy solo in the face of his death is gripping; her incomprehension bleak. Gary Avis lends Gremin just the right tender solicitude. There are other performances with many casts, but this was a night to remember.
So was the first time I saw Onegin, when it was in the repertoire of English National Ballet and featured a devastating central performance from guest artist Natalia Makarova. That memory flooded back at ENB’s gala to celebrate its 70th anniversary, as did thoughts of sitting through Harald Lander’s Études – formal variations on a ballet class – which was often on the bill when I was watching the company then known as Festival Ballet while I was growing up.
To mark its birthday, the company’s current artistic director, Tamara Rojo, revived this once ubiquitous work as the conclusion of an even-handed, intelligent and engrossing programme. Giving a fair chance for the corps de ballet to shine, the event used film and performances to provide a good glimpse of the company’s history while also showcasing its illustrious present and its impressive form.
Highlights included Sergio Bernal’s thrilling performance of a farruca from Antonio Ruiz Soler’s The Three-Cornered Hat; a glimpse of Ben Stevenson’s Three Preludes (performed at the matinee I saw by Jia Zhang and Skyler Martin) that made you long to see how the whole ballet stands up; and William Forsythe’s electrifying Playlist (Track 2), which sets classical virtuosity to hip-hop music with explosive results.
Star ratings (out of five)
Onegin ★★★★★
English National Ballet’s 70th anniversary gala ★★★★
• Onegin is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 29 February
