The Stage

Manon

Published Friday 24 October 2008 at 15:20 by Jeremy Brien

Kenneth MacMillan’s ballets are best suited to companies willing to take risks. This is very much the case with English National Ballet’s first-ever production of the Royal Danish Ballet’s sumptuous staging of his modern classic of passion, debauchery and eventual redemption. Swan Lake it most certainly is not.

The current autumn tour is the first time the ballet has been seen in the provinces for 20 years, and the demands that the dramatic plot make on the performers’ acting skills are met in stunning fashion by the 67-strong company.

Friedemann Vogel, upright and fluent as the student Des Grieux, and Daria Klimentova, in the title role, bring a Romeo and Juliet feeling to their romantic first act pas de deux, and Klimentova manages throughout to dance the sensitive line between the courtesan who enjoys her power over men and the genuine heroine of a morality tale.

Her love for Des Grieux comes over stronger than her ambivalence towards her rich suitor, Monsieur GM, danced by Antony Dowson, and her pimp of a brother Lescaut, an arrogant Fabian Reimair, and by the time the death scene pas de deux in the swamps of Louisiana is reached, her dancing has become mesmeric.

There is welcome comic relief in the drunken pas de deux of Lescaut and his mistress, a provocative Sarah McIlroy. The large corps de ballet capture the joie de vivre, if not always the decadence, of 18th-century Paris and the full ENB symphony orchestra is impressively comfortable with Massenet’s lush score.