Anthony Russell-Roberts (1944-2024)
The Royal Ballet will announce today something that emerged on Facebook two days ago: the death of Anthony Russell-Roberts, the administrative director of the Royal Ballet from 1983 to 2009, nephew of Frederick Ashton, inheritor of more than thirty Ashton ballets, and a valued figure in both the (ultimately unsuccessful) Ashton Trust and the (still effective) Ashton Foundation. A man of genial charm and warmth, with twinkling eyes and a ready smile, he formed with Anthony Dowell, Monica Mason, and Jeanetta Laurence a happy team that they themselves nicknamed “the Gang of Four” during most of the 1986-2001 years that Dowell was the Royal Ballet’s director, Monica Mason his assistant director, Russell-Roberts its administrative director, and Laurence its artistic administrator. I interviewed all four of them in the years 2014-2018, three of them together: it was evident that they were gleeful to be reunited, with much mutual respect.
Russell-Roberts was the son of Ashton’s beloved only sister Edith. He often spoke of his memories of Ashton visiting his mother in deep depression on multiple occasions; although his mother would begin with the same depression, it was always she would could rouse her brother into laughter. When Russell-Roberts became the Royal Ballet’s artistic administrator in the mid-1980s, some unfairly tried to claim that this was Covent Garden nepotism; he was already an experienced opera administrator in opera houses away from London. Russell-Roberts soon proved himself a canny diplomat around the sometimes Byzantine realm of the Royal Ballet: I remember once, after asking him a tough question about the company’s lack of a music director, being disarmed by the intelligence and bonhomie with which he cheerfully entered into discussion.
When Ashton died, he left a will that - apparently following the model set by that of George Balanchine - left twelve crucial ballets to six especially valued people. The rest he bequeathed to his nephew. It may not have been evident to Ashton that some of those ballets would often be performed: “Marguerite and Armand” had not been danced since 1988, “The Tales of Beatrix Potter” had never been given in live performance, and few expected the full-length “Sylvia” to be returned to the stage. In the event, those three have been performed many times - “Marguerite” and “Sylvia” by several companies around the world.
Other legatees seem to have been the reason why the Ashton Trust - eventually - proved a failure, but Russell-Roberts was, with Anthony Dyson and Anthony Dowell - the three Anthonies! - among the vital reasons why the Ashton Foundation has endured. They, and other crucial Ashton figures understood that, while the financial revenues of these ballets could be bequeathed this way or that, it was vital to cede artistic control to a larger Ashton authority, a group that brought known experts and alumni together to serve the ballets. Initially, admittedly, Russell-Roberts was reluctant to become a trustee when first approached some months after the Foundation had been founded (by Tony Dyson, Jeanetta Laurence, and Christopher Nourse). He eventually agreed, however; he was appointed at the same time as Monica Mason, six months later.
(It was Jeanetta Laurence - Christopher Nourse advises me - who was the driving force behind ensuring that Ashton’s legacy should be maintained by the Ashton Foundation more effectively than the failing Ashton Trust was able to do. And it was she who was largely responsible for Nourse, as a Governor of The Royal Ballet, being asked by the Royal Ballet to review how the Trust might better serve its purpose. It became obvious to Nourse very quickly, after attending a meeting and interviewing the individual rights-holders, that a properly-structured charity with far less involvement from the rights-holders was needed. In consequence, Nourse recommended that a “Frederick Ashton Foundation” be established – which the Royal Ballet duly asked Nourse to set up and then asked him to run! It was right and proper that of the then rights-holders, Tony Dyson, who had been a key figure in the formation of the Trust as well as Ashton’s closest companion in his final years, and Russell-Roberts, as his nephew, should be Trustees, with Dyson as chairman until Laurence took over in 2022.)
Inevitably we can argue (I often do) about the realisation of details and overall style in any ballet by a dead choreographer, but it is crucial (as the makers of the Balanchine Trust realised many years before those of the Ashton legacy) to separate financial possession from artistic decisions. Russell-Roberts knew plenty about the Ashton ballets, but he did not impose his knowledge single-handed upon the way they were staged. In the case of “Marguerite”, I often wish someone had imposed more: at least one vital detail of that ballet has never been effectively realised by dancers since Margot Fonteyn (the slow exit with stuttering hands and feet after her public humiliation by Armand). With “Sylvia”, however, while several details could also be improved, the choreography has been maintained with enough love and understanding to give the ballet a degree of international success that nobody envisioned in Ashton’s lifetime (in this century, it has been danced by companies on three continents) .
In later years, Russell-Roberts told me of his crucial role in securing Sylvie Guillem and Irek Mukhamedov as longterm senior principal dancers with the Royal Ballet - an achievement that will remain large in any history of the company. But that Gang of Four worked together with great good humour on many other vital and historic points. When Jeremy Isaacs unwisely admitted a television team to make the five-part Covent Garden documentary “The House”, the Gang of Four brilliantly deflected attention by deciding, whether cameras were rolling, to make their conversations dull and unsensational; only when the television team withdrew from the room did they speak freely of any troubles besetting the company. The controversies arising from “The House” were ones of opera, not ballet.
That sounds like mere fun. The Dowell regime had already been heavily criticised, by me among others. We can see now, however, how that Gang of Four steered the Royal Ballet through four of the biggest crises in its history: (a) the death of Frederick Ashton in 1988 (b) the death of Kenneth MacMillan in 1992 (c) that “House” documentary in 1996 (d) the two-year closure of the Covent Garden company in 1997-1999, years in which the permanently feckless and determinedly philistine Arts Council attempted to stop the company from being a year-round institution.
Russell-Roberts was a skilled diplomat. Like many diplomats, he had a private life. Nobody who knew him in later years could doubt the great happiness he found with his second wife, Jane Holkenfeldt <2>; or the lasting sense of loss that attended him after her untimely death. He himself met a swift but devastating death from cancer, less than three months before his eightieth birthday. I remember him with pleasure; I wish I had known him much, much better.
Tuesday 16 January, 2024
