It was 30 years ago this month that the great choreographer Kenneth MacMillan died of a heart-attack, backstage at the Royal Opera House, during a performance of his dark-as-night tragedy Mayerling.
If the suddenness was shocking, and the timing tragic (he was only 62, still bursting with ideas), it was also eerily appropriate for a man who had given so much both to the art form and to that particular building, and whose work dwelled so uncompromisingly on the evanescence of life. Small wonder the Royal Ballet is dedicating its season-opening revival of this work to his memory.
Diligently based on the events surrounding the double murder-suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary and his 17-year-old mistress Mary Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge in 1889, Mayerling (1978) remains a vast, astonishing, uniquely ambitious ballet that demands a prior read of the synopsis. Thanks to Nicholas Georgiadis’s designs (opulently of the time and place, but also with an elegiacally autumnal edge) and John Lanchbery’s brilliant orchestral reworkings of Liszt, it looks and sounds magnificent. A sumptuous, three-hour vortex of self-destruction, it is “dated” only in its resolute avoidance of black-and-white moralising, and it also, in Rudolf, boasts the richest and most demanding role for a man in any ballet.
Wednesday’s stirring first night – with both corps and orchestra marvellously fresh – also marked four years, almost to the day, since Royal Ballet principal Ryoichi Hirano first took it on. Although too dashing to be an obvious natural as the put-upon, syphilitic, morphine-addicted Rudolf – one thinks back a few years to the terrifyingly convincing Johan Kobborg, and right back to the role’s pitch-perfect originator, David Wall – Hirano fully puts his back into the role, revelling in the physical and emotional abandon it demands, but also doing so with intelligence. Where some Rudolfs go for full-bore deranged from the outset, he lets his character uncoil from rigidity to recklessness, and – the real trick – ultimately makes us care deeply for this titanically flawed anti-hero.
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