'Manon' review — a lavish production of Kenneth Macmillan's tender, morally complex ballet

Read our review of Manon, now in performances at the Royal Opera House to 19 November.

Summary

• Kenneth Macmillan's Manon is performed at the Royal Opera House
• This beautiful but challenging work shows ballet's power for moral ambivalence
• Lauren Cuthbertson and Matthew Ball are ideal partners as Manon and Des Grieux

First performed in 1974 and based on the 1731 novel by the Abbé Prévost, Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon is the story of a young lady who gets waylaid on her way to enter a convent, but it’s clear from the beginning that she was never nun material. MacMillan’s ballet shocked many critics on its premiere due to the way in which the beauty of leads Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell was employed in such savage material.

Staged by former Royal Ballet principal dancer Laura Morera, this revival is lavish with its lushly romantic Massenet patchwork score and giddy high spirits. On the other hand, the content involves backstabbing, sexual violence, and a final act that comes close to voyeuristic misery porn, yet it’s also beautiful in its sheer ambition.

At the performance I attended, Lauren Cuthbertson made a compelling journey from ingénue to diamond of the demi-monde to publicly disgraced fallen woman. Her Manon’s girlhood is short-lived as she quickly gains a sense of what she is worth in monetary value. Cuthbertson displays a truly queenly bearing as she puts herself on show at the brothel party in the second act, yet her power is entirely transient.

She has the ideal partner in Matthew Ball as Des Grieux, who falls in love with Manon at first sight over a dropped book. The gorgeously slow first solo in which he courts Manon is a masterclass in technical control and chivalrous acting. He is the perfect embodiment of the romantic student and eternal lover, following Manon all the way to the swamps of Louisiana.

The lovers’ pas de deux are exquisite, particularly the tenderness of their bedroom number, but it is possible to detect some niggles with the plot. Des Grieux is so gentlemanly in his advances to Manon that it seems incongruous that he would run off to live in sin with her (though perhaps he is merely a man after all). And when Manon is palmed off onto foot fetishist Monsieur G.M. (Ryoichi Hirano) who offers fur coats and diamonds, she accepts a little too quickly after experiencing a morning of bliss with Des Grieux.

Manon’s opportunistic brother Lescaut was danced by Valentino Zucchetti in his penultimate performance ahead of retirement. A wiry figure, his drunken second act solo and pas de deux with his Mistress (a flirtatious Leticia Dias) illustrate Lescaut's tendency to get carried away and undermine his attempts at social climbing in one fell swoop.

MacMillan’s use of crowd scenes come with many layers. The mixing of social classes at the inn where Manon first arrives include a band of ragamuffins as well as ladies in big hats and muffs; at the brothel, clients throw a handful of coins on the floor for the “girls” to scramble around for, and, at the dock, the wives of the officers pruriently look on at the parade of fallen women with their cropped hair and grey underdresses doing their walk of shame.

Nicholas Georgiadis’s set design demonstrates that poverty is never far away: the inn is draped with rags like a tent city. Jacopo Pantani’s lighting adopts a sickly luridness as the end approaches – death isn’t pretty in this piece.

It sparked a heated debate between two ladies near me experiencing the piece for the first time regarding how much autonomy Manon has. Ballet isn’t always a pretty diversion, and this piece exemplifies its power for moral ambivalence in which the audience is provided with plenty of opportunities to fill in the gaps.

Manon is at the Royal Opera House to 19 November. Book Manon tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Manon (Photos by Andrej Uspenski)