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Royal BalletFebruary 2005 London, Covent Garden © Jeffery Taylor Former dancer, Critic and an Arts feature writer for the |
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Kenneth MacMillan’s steamy expose of the louche Parisian demimonde seduces you into its sweaty embraces as surely as scented night follows hung-over day. Mind you the only daylight built into the ballet is the relentless Southern sun glaring down on the penal colony in the Louisiana swamps where the eponymous courtesan, Manon Lescaut, dies a horrible death in the arms of her tragic lover. But it’s not all doom and gloom. MacMillan uses Jules Massenet’s lilting and irresistibly danceable music (while avoiding the composer’s 1884 opera) to create some of his most inventive and luscious sequences of steps as the Royal Ballet dancers get their teeth into tarts, rat catchers and aristocrats. As precisely structured as any of Petipa’s great Imperial classics, Manon displays the depth of the Royal’s talent, from the balletic spear carriers to last month’s National Dance Awards winner Jonathan Cope as student Des Grieux who falls desperately in love with Manon, French guest artist Sylvie Guillem. Brazilian born Thiago Soares is a strangely bad tempered Lescaut, Manon’s brother and pimp, but does such a convincing, and hilarious, job with his drunken solo and duet with Mara Galeazzi, that I bet his bosses made a few enquiries about his leisure habits. Former company director and dancer, Anthony Dowell, plays Msr. G.M. as a dessicated but ruthless pleasure seeker as he buys Manon from Des Grieux’s bed and thus reveals the enigma that is Manon. Perhaps MacMillan’s greatest gift to the British stage was his ability to build into his characters the ineffable fact that human nature can rarely be pinned down. Unfortunately Guillem does not do ambiguity; mystery is not in her vocabulary. Her Manon’s motives for leaving her young lover are too clear – greed. Drenched in Msr G.M’s wealth she comes on like a medieval queen and nails Manon securely into the missionary position.
Luckily Cope gives such a touching and deeply moving portrayal of a man hopelessly blinded by love that the skewed dramatic emphasis proves irrelevant to this MacMillan masterpiece. There are five more Manons this month, catch one if you can.
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