Giselle: a most honest romance

Royal Ballet & Opera, London
February 14, 2026

Walking through the busy streets of Covent Garden, past couples, Sir Peter Wright’s Giselle for The Royal Ballet (created in 1985) lifted the curtain on Valentine’s Day. Set to Adolphe Adam’s score and framed by John Macfarlane’s painterly, Constable-like designs, the performance was led by Marianela Nuñez and William Bracewell, who made his role debut as Albrecht.

Giselle demands formidable footwork and stamina, with steps packed at astonishing density. Quick shifts of direction, continual jumps and beaten work in the air arrive in rapid succession, writing ‘youth’ as momentum and speed. The men’s petit allegro is thick with detail, their batterie firing like a sequence of blinks, full of boyish pride and play.

Nuñez’s Giselle looks unusually light within this world. Her peasant dancing is clean and loose, its ease producing flow rather than force. She holds something back though. The irrepressible daughter still shows through, yet there is greater fragility. That restraint sharpens what follows, since collapse rarely begins with a sudden increase in volume. It comes when someone already vulnerable reaches the end of what the body can bear.

Her mad scene is devastating in its sound. Nuñez’s breathing is clearly audible, and what the audience hears is a body coming undone. At first, the loss of control carries the flavour of a young girl making a spectacle of herself, a last attempt to pull her lover back. She cannot rein it in. The breath grows heavier, and by the end heartbreak seems to have its own voice, sorrow, rage and shame folding into one another.

Bracewell has limited dancing in Act I, yet his footwork is reassuringly clean, his small beats bright and precise. What truly brings him into focus is the acting after the revelation. Courtesy and social ease give way to an awkwardness that cannot find its gaze. He tries to escape and finds no exit. When he grasps that the situation has become a real catastrophe, panic takes over with alarming clarity. Even from a distant seat, he seems to turn pale, because his physical acting convinces.

The pas de six provides one of the act’s highlights. Sae Maeda and Joonhyuk Jun dance with clean lines and clarity. Viola Pantuso and Ella Newton Severgnini offer a duet that is sweet without cloying, genuinely buoyant, with a bright edge of youth.

Act II begins with Claire Calvert’s Myrtha, who initially carries less overt menace than expected. She reads instead as a cold, restrained figure, almost too beautiful. Authority gathers gradually, shaped by her summons of attendants and Wilis. She becomes rule itself. Each gesture looks like the execution of a command, and the burden of one.

Nuñez’s Giselle grows lighter again, so light that she seems close to drifting away. The footwork stays clean, her whole presence lifted as if by moonlight, supple to the point of barely belonging to the ground. Her Giselle does not move along a path of forgiveness rooted in love. Mercy drives her instead, a gentleness that cannot accept the taking of a life. Hilarion’s death therefore lands with particular force. The question returns in spite of itself: why must he be killed?

Bracewell fully holds the second act. The technique is strong, and more striking is the way he plays guilt, exhaustion and despair so persuasively that collapse appears imminent. There are moments when his legs seem ready to give way and his breathing seems unsettled, yet he continues, launching a run of entrechats that are so clean they make one want to ask, half seriously, whether his legs hurt. The contrast is brutal. It becomes hard to see only virtuosity. A living man seems to wager himself through dancing.

His partnership with Nuñez is also exceptional. The adagio pas de deux unfolds to the cello’s sound, with Nuñez extending like a vine and filling the music. Bracewell proves a reliable partner, steady in support, attentive to her timing and breath.

At the curtain call, Sir Peter Wright and set designer John Macfarlane step onstage to acknowledge the audience, prompting immediate cheers and applause.

In the seat beside mine, a woman holds a single red rose. On Valentine’s Day, to watch Giselle feels like the theatre’s choice of the most honest romance.