The late Liam Scarlett’s Swan Lake and the Royal Ballet’s loss of direction

<first published by Dancing Times in 2022; here slightly amplified>

Swan Lake, in its traditional form, is a political ballet. Its alternating scenes offer us two rival power-plays. The court scenes are coloured by the politics of dynastic succession: will the prince marry (and beget an heir and ensure the continuance of the dynasty)? The lakeside scenes are about an oppressed populace: will Odette and her swan-maidens be able to shake off the tyranny of the sorcerer Rothbart? Swan Lake, as Arlene Croce wrote in 1973, is about freedom. Although nobody can be sure now just how the 1895 St Petersburg production ended after the love-in-death double suicide of Odette and Prince Siegfried, Royal Ballet tradition - during the years 1948-2018 and perhaps earlier - had Rothbart try to re-assert his power over the swan-maidens in vain. As they resisted his dominion, he staggered off in defeat. Watching films of that ending in 2022 (for example, the 1980 Makarova-Dowell television film), we can see Rothbart as Putin and can say, with the swan-maidens, “We are Ukrainians all.”

The late Liam Scarlett’s superficially glamorous but strangely unmoving Royal Ballet production, new in 2018, derails all these aspects of this great classic. Instead, this production superimposes its version of Rothbart as Machiavel climbing to totalitarian power both in the palace and by the lake. A prologue shows us Odette as his abused victim; it suggests that Rothbart’s claim on her is sexual. Scarlett’s production is, however, uninterested in why Odette is the ruler of many other women by the lake, or in why she intervenes to save them from the huntsmen, or in how their fate is bound up with hers. Keen to tell a new story, Scarlett promptly forgot to tell half the story he himself set up.

The company was performing this miserable, over-pretty version in March 2020 when the lockdown changed world history. That very month, the Royal broke relations with Scarlett while choosing to keep Swan Lake – alone of his creations – in repertory. Thirteen months later, Scarlett took his own life. We’re left with a botched Swan Lake that does no credit to him or to the original ballet.

Covent Garden’s performances of March 1-5 (2022), the company’s first post-pandemic revival of Scarlett’s version, were all preceded by the playing of the Ukrainian national anthem, deeply affecting at those I attended on March 1 and 4. I also admired the Siegfrieds at both those performances. On March 1, Vadim Muntagirov showed the subtlest acting detail I have observed in him (quick turns of the head and eyes that showed his conflicted loyalties). And the seamlessness with which he delivers rapid pairs of double air turns in the ballroom is glorious. He had announced that day that he was dedicating his performance to the Ukrainian people; it was easy to feel a new darkness within his always stylish, bright, blazing dancing. On March 4, Federico Bonelli, in the same role, was giving his farewell performance after almost eighteen years’ valiant service with the Royal Ballet: it was good to have this last chance to love again the innocent integrity of his stage manners and his dancing’s full-toned ardour.

Yasmine Naghdi, replacing Marianela Nuñez (recovering from Covid), danced Odette-Odile on March 1. She impressed me, even more than in other ballerina roles, with her immaculate delivery and technical skill. She was even, in the final act, intense. Yet who is Yasmine Naghdi? At no moment do I find her individual, original, or touching. Will this come? Perhaps.

Fumi Kaneko, making her debut in the same role on March 4 and meeting all its technical challenges surely, applied far too much externalised acting, as if not trusting the choreography to speak for her. Her over-bright eyes kept searching Siegfried’s in ways that made her Odette as come-hither as her Odile. (“Don’t look at him!” said Alicia Markova, when coaching an Odette in the great adagio in a 1980 television coaching session.) By the lakeside, Kaneko was cloyingly needy; in the ballroom, she could not have done more to advertise her evil. Why not take Siegfried seriously by showing Odile as an Odette on fire, rather than as the scheming minx from hell? Kaneko, an artist I’ve admired in other roles, will surely be more moving when she simplifies her act. Koen Kessels, conducting, allows each ballerina to set her own slow tempo. This is especially depressing in the first lakeside scene’s coda, when the speed suddenly goes to half-speed for Odette’s return to the stage.

In general, the Royal’s women in this Swan Lake - soloists and ensemble alike - are efficient, well-drilled, anonymous. Up to 1978, the Royal corps de ballet was a miracle in this ballet, both bright in footwork and powerfully poignant in upper-body gesture. Watching, you felt complex drama – their hope, their despair – through their pure-dance qualities. Today’s corps dancers may well be technically better than the women at whom I once marvelled; but their technique is not well focused. I sense no particular accentuation, no special musical phrasing: this is Swan Lake as company ritual. Are these swan-maidens rejoicing to regain human form or straining against their larger captivity? In the 1970s, I used to feel both. With today’s corps I feel neither.

This may be Swan Lake, but it’s a men’s show. Thomas Whitehead (Friday 4) makes Rothbart grimly subtle. Even in the Neapolitan Dance, Luca Acri has a tearway edge lacking in Yuhui Choe (March 1), though they’re doing the same steps side by side.

James Hay (Tuesday 1) has real lustre as Benno, although it’s idiotic of Scarlett to make Benno, a non-aristocrat, dance one, no, two formal pas de trois with the prince’s two royal sisters. What kind of ballet de cour is this supposed to be? I saw Isabella Gasparini and Meaghan Grace Hinkis (March 1), Mariko Sasaki and Melissa Hamilton (March 4) as Benno’s princess partners, all exhibiting showy soubrette-like displays of charm that made them seem mere court entertainers.

What’s saddest here is that the Royal Ballet with this production has relinquished any claim to be a guardian of either the 1895 choreographic text by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov or its own sensitively evolved tradition in this ballet as shaped by Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton. Whoever was daft enough to think Scarlett should become the interpreter of what was once of the Royal’s signature classics? We must assume Kevin O’Hare, director of the Royal Ballet since 2012, is responsible: does he or anyone at Covent Garden care about how the whole Royal Ballet’s ethos is derailed by pursuing the Peter Wright notion that it’s okay to tinker with large parts of a ballet’s historic text to tell a different story? Wright has altered the Royal Ballet’s Giselle and Nutcracker for the worse; O’Hare, who came up through the ranks of Wright’s Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham) Royal Ballet, evidently thinks it’s perfectly okay for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden to dump large parts of Petipa and Ivanov in favour of the late Scarlett. Must I point out that the historic importance of the Royal Ballet for decades lay largely in its role as the world’s leading exponent of these classics that it had placed as the core of its repertory? Apparently I must.

Meanwhile, thanks to Alexei Ratmansky, other twentyfirst-century companies in Zürich, Milan, and Miami have now staged Swan Lakes with Petipa’s spectacular opening-scene waltz, never seen in the west before 2016. (Nicholas Sergueyev never staged it in his British productions of Swan Lake.) Scarlett’s Odile dances an anthology of Soviet clichés, almost all tacky deviations from Petipa. In the first lakeside scene, Scarlett’s Odette and swan-maidens dance one adaptation of an older adaptation of a previous adaptation, while nobody at Covent Garden appears interested in restoring Ivanov’s original. What does the Royal Ballet stand for any more?