BALLET
Ballet imperial
ROBIN YOUNG
Anastasia is the Royal Opera House's first new full-length ballet for six years, and the first by Kenneth MacMillan for the same length of time. It is moreover MacMillan's first fresh creation for the Royal Ballet since he became their director a year ago. Expectations therefore were high, and in most quarters disappointment has been considerable.
Its history perhaps places the ballet in a fairer perspective. It originated as a one-acter during MacMillan's stint in Berlin, presented because something else was not ready. To the original one act (now the third), MacMillan has added two more. No doubt he has been kept more than busy since he returned to Covent Garden. Lack of time, rather than creative Inspiration, may have been the reason for which MacMillan chose to return to Anastasia and treble its length. The ballet should be regarded as a pot-boiler. The two new acts, set to Tchaikovsky's first and third symphonies, are about the Imperial family before the Russian Revolution. The third, with an electronic prologue and Martinu's Fantaisies Symphoniques, is MacMillan's original ballet about Anna Anderson, the woman who believes that she is the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of the Tsar. The divide between the two elements of the present, lengthened, ballet is absolute. They do not relate to each other In either music or dance style.
Act 1 represents the Imperial family at a picnic in August 1914. Barry Kay's settings, which prove their greater worth in the subsequent acts, are unbearably wintry for such a scene. A picnic seems improbable, but when a file of gents in bathing costumes appear and proceed to jump in a lake the effect borders on the farcical. It was not for nothing, either, that Tchaikovsky's first symphony, to which this summery act is danced, was called Winter Dreams.
Anastasia enters on roller skates, dances with the officers, plays with the Tsarevich and, in one genuinely moving moment, simulates her mother in an aristocratic variation on a folk-dance. Lynn Seymour makes her remarkably endearing — at once playful (pulling faces at the Tsar's camera) and adolescently inhibited (hands buckled into armpits). There are good variations for individual officers in the party (Dowell, Wall and Coleman). The rest is padding. Derek Rencher's Tsar, receiving the bad news about the outbreak of war, reminds one quite irresistibly of his Edward Elgar, in Enigma Variations, receiving the good news about the publication of some music in London. Svetlana Beriosova, whether Tsarina or Mrs Elgar, can be relied on to be suitably sympathetic.
Act 2 is Anastasia's unhistorical coming-out ball in March 1917. A prologue with soup-kitchen suffices for a glance at the world beyond the palace gates. There is a good deal of cantering for the sumptuously clad guests at the ball — sub Raymonda stuff — and none of this carries the story one step forward until the soup kitchen reappears, now dispensing manifestos and guns, and finally the palace is unexcitingly overrun with Red Flag-waving revolutionaries.
Any historian will allow that quite a lot happened in the years 1914 to 1917. Russian defeats at the front and the murder of Rasputin (which MacMillan elides from history) at least might have been expected to impinge on court life. Remembering other ballets based in revolutionary times (the Bolshoi's Spartacus. for example, or the Peking Ballet's very fine Red Detachment of Women) one cannot help thinking that MacMillan has wasted great opportunities by making his ballet as uneventful as his scores.
The (inadequate) excuse supposedly is that this is court life seen through Anastasia's eyes. A similar excuse has to be called in aid of the jumbled agonies of Act 3 — that this is Anna Anderson reliving her past, or living out her fantasies. The central figure's mental state is made the reason for not telling the story clearly but merely hinting at it through repetitive dance movements.
There is no gainsaying the dramatic force and intensity of Lynn Seymour's performance here. But the question which has made the Anastasia story worth a play, two films, several books and countless newspaper articles is: Is Anna Anderson really Anastasia? MacMillan's ballet, far from pretending to answer the question, does not even ask it, but satisfies itself with the assumption that she believes she is. The ballet ends with Seymour taking a ride round the stage on a magical moving bed — not a climax, but an ending appropriately irrelevant and subdued.
Previous page
