© W&N Publishers Page This book is avilable from: Dance Books Amazon Judith Mackrell reviews Ian Palmer reviews

Hers is a fascinating tale, fascinatingly told. Born into poverty in St. Petersburg, she was enrolled into the Imperial Theatre School in the hope that a career in dance might bring the family money. She studied and graduated into the Imperial Company, where her effervescent personality attracted the admiration of Fokine, who encouraged Diaghilev to hire her for his second Ballets Russes season. So she travelled to Paris, danced Sylphides, Carnaval, Firebird, won Diaghilev’s (or Big Serge as she began mischievously to call him) and the public’s admiration, before hopping on a boat to America where she was peddled around by various rogue Impresarios earning £1,000 a week. It was a tiring business so when the opportunity to re-unite with Diaghilev’s troupe arose, Lopokova jumped and her reward was to be gifted some of Massine’s (Diaghilev’s newest protégé) sparkliest creations – Mariuccia in The Good-Humoured Ladies, the Can-Can dance in La Boutique Fantasque, both entirely fitted to her emploi as a natural Soubrette. On and off she remained with Diaghilev (the box-office draw of her name, always bridging any divisions between them) and it was whilst sharing the roles of Aurora, Lilac Fairy and Princess Florine, during the financially disastrous run of Sleeping Beauty at London’s Alhambra, that Keynes fell under her spell.

They dined, they courted and she was placed in residence at Gordon Square – the centre of Bloomsbury – as Keynes’ accepted lover, to the horror of his friends. But she had her winning ways; her “Lydian” English – “I shiver and I become a fidget case”, is how she described a bout of nerves; her “Champagne laughter” – Ashton once recalled that a taxi driver declined to take a fare saying “to hear that lady laugh has done me more good than anything”. And so the coupled married (once the small matter of a bigamist Italian husband had been settled), living in Bloomsbury, Cambridge and, most happily, at Tilton, their residence in Sussex; a veritable Darby and Joan. As war advanced and illness beset Keynes, she became his rock as he – called upon by Neville Chamberlain to settle the Anglo-American “Lend Lease” – travelled to the United States for endless negotiations. Of course Lopokova was at his side, a Diplomat’s wife of extreme eccentricity. The High Commissioner of Canada recalled meeting her for the very first time as she descended the plane: flinging her arms around him she exclaimed, “Oh my dear High commissar, how are you? I dreamed zat I was lying in bed and zat you were lying in my arms.” But the pressure on Keynes was immense and in the year following the Declaration of Peace he suffered a heart attack and died, leaving behind a widowed Lopokova entirely bereft. She lived, alone, for a further thirty-five years, dying in 1981 a recluse.

Mackrell guides us through Lopokova’s life in giddy, sprightly, gossipy fashion, entirely fitting to this bubbliest of characters. Her research is thorough and enlightening, not least in its focus on the correspondence between Keynes and Lopokova, unearthed from the archives at King’s College in Cambridge, telling as much about him as it does of her. (Lopokova resolutely refused to discuss Keynes with any of his biographers.) On her career with Diaghilev, Mackrell is exhaustive in her analysis and especially pertinent too on her earlier Imperial years in Russia where her brother, Fyodor Lopukhov, would later become a giant of Soviet ballet (before Stalin denounced his new work The Bright Stream as “balletic fraud”). Yet there are minor flaws. At moments of Lopokova’s life where fact is sketchy, Mackrell has speculated wildly, suggesting certain un-explained absences were due to various miscarriages and abortions. So too in Russia, when Lopokova is re-united with her family, does Mackrell imagine “the confusion of embraces and exclamations, the unloading of parcels, the conversations started and interrupted, the cataloguing of physical changes.” Yet these should not detract from the energy, the humour of the subject and of the text: Mackrell presents Lopokova as a delightful charmer, eccentric yet entirely winning, and ensures that the “genius” of her personality can never be forgotten.