A new McGregor and a riveting Anastasia from The Royal Ballet

Royal Opera House, London
June 10, 2023

The Royal Ballet’s latest mixed bill opens with Wayne McGregor’s new and elegantly clean Untitled, 2023. The title is a nod to artist Carmen Herrera, who designed the set before her death in 2022 aged 106, and who had a habit of dating but not titling her creations.

That set consists of a white, tilted ‘L’ shaped sculpture slightly off to one side, and a backdrop of a wide, shallow green triangle on a white background. White and green are also the colours of the dancers’ body stockings: all differently patterned, some white front, green back, others the reverse, some with swirls. They are not unlike those preferred by Merce Cunningham. The different patterning gives different perspectives and creates different images as bodies move and turn.

Anna Rose O’Sullivan and Melissa Hamilton in Untitled, 2023
Photo The Royal Opera House, Alice Pennefather

The essentially abstract choreography is very much left to personal interpretation. There’s no narrative. I’m sure McGregor does, but I couldn’t see much connection with the set (apart from its cool elegance) or Herrera’s work either. The choreography does reflect Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Catamorphosis and Metacosmos, played back to back, however. The music might not be something you would put on to relax to but, like the dance, is loaded with interest as moments of intensity and urgency are balanced with stillness and calm. Untitled, 2023 is very engaging.

There’s a hint of Cunningham in his more balletic mood in some of choreography too, especially in the ensemble sections. In the duets, there are plenty of McGregor’s favoured big extensions but with lots of classical moments to enjoy also. There are even a few fouettés.

Untitled, 2023 is largely a dance of overlapping solos and duets, each coming with a different mood. All the time, phrases and choreographic ideas are taken, developed and passed on from performer to performer, growing before finally dissolving away at the end.

The Royal Ballet in Untitled, 2023
Photo The Royal Opera House, Alice Pennefather

A fabulous opening solo by Joseph Sissens is a little edgy, a combination of effortless leaps and dead stops. A duet that follows feels more tension-filled, again, just like the music.

The highlight is a softer duet for Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell. As Thorvaldsdottir’s music fills the theatre, the couple echo and dance in unison. With them always perfectly at one with each other, it was riveting.

Other dances come and go. A complex ensemble section sees couples and small groups come together in unison before quickly shifting apart once more. There is so much going on, so many good things to see, it’s hard to know where to look. It ends with one final solo. Edging into the silence after the music fades away, a man may turn alone, but you feel he’s full of memories as the curtain and darkness fall.

The Royal Ballet in Corybantic Games by Christopher Wheeldon
Photo The Royal Opera House, Alice Pennefather

In contrast, Christopher Wheeldon’s Corybantic Games, a look at love and relationships to Leonard Bernstein’s five-movement Serenade after Plato’s Symposium, is warm and occasionally witty.

‘Corybantic’ suggests the choreography is wild and frenzied. It’s anything but. Even the all-male section near the beginning, while neatly depicting male support and bonding, is rather calm. The following section for the women is light, airy and serene.

The first of the duets (Nicol Edmonds and David Donnelly) is beautifully fluid and gentle but the ballet is at its best in the fourth movement, which sees three simultaneous romantic, different but linked duets, on the differing nature of love: Melissa Hamilton and Reece Clarke, Isabella Gasparini and Gina Storm-Jensen , and Edmonds and Donnelly again. It’s unusual to have an all-female duet where both are on pointe, and this one is by some way the best I’ve seen. Maybe because Wheeldon doesn’t force things, doesn’t insist on traditional partnering, but lets the dance and the relationship evolve naturally.

It’s backed by Jean-Marc Puissant’s excellent, ever-shifting, geometric, architectural design that, depending on Peter Mumford’s lighting looks like steelwork or frosted windows. Not so good are Erdem Moralioglu’s costumes which do the men and women alike no favours. The gossamer pleated skirts the women wear at first are fine. It’s the frumpy underwear that’s the issue. Both they and the men’s costumes come with black shoulder ribbons crossed front and back, that flap around endlessly, distracting and annoying throughout.

Natalia Osipova as Anna Anderson in Anastasia
Photo The Royal Opera House, Tristram Kenton

Act III of Kenneth MacMillan’s Anastasia tells of Anna Anderson, who believed she was the youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and a survivor of the family’s execution by Bolshevik revolutionaries in Yekaterinburg in 1918. Reports that Anastasia was still alive had long been persistent, although we now know that was not the case.

MacMillan paints a remarkable picture of a troubled woman. Natalia Osipova is magnificent as Anna, trapped in her imagined memories. She lives the character fully. Utterly committed, she makes you believe as much as Anna believed. The walls of the set mirror those of the mental hospital in which she was held, and those in her mind. Walls from which there was no escape. Even when she sits with her back to the audience, with us watching grainy old film of the family, Osipova’s body says so much.

As her real-life visitors come and go, so do those in her tormented mind, her child, her husband (David Donnelly), the soldiers who carried out the vividly replayed executions and Matthew Ball’s ever-present, deliciously sinister Rasputin.

The final scene sears into the mind: Anna, riding her bed like a carriage as the ghosts of her invented past watch on. An astonishing ballet and an astonishing performance from a marvellous artist.