Manon review: Royal Ballet raises the bar with superb cast led by Francesca Hayward

Marcelino Sambé and Francesca Hayward are 'beautifully matched'

(Image credit: Foteini Christofilopoulou)

published 25 January 2024

What a glorious start to the year for lovers of ballet, said Mark Monahan in The Daily Telegraph. Earlier this month, the English National Ballet "played a formidable hand" with its terrific revival of "Giselle". Now the Royal Ballet has raised the bar yet higher with a "positively incandescent" staging of "Manon", Kenneth MacMillan's "dark, sexy" masterpiece. The superb cast is led by Francesca Hayward on "knockout" form, and there's not a "single uninteresting character on stage", nor a dull moment. This is "thrilling, grown-up entertainment", and if you can't get to Covent Garden, catch it at the cinema (various screenings from 7 February). "Just go."

"Manon" was "quite the shocker when it premiered in 1974", said David Jays in the Evening Standard. Based on Prévost's novel "Manon Lescaut" (1731), it tells the story of a young woman who falls for a penniless student, Des Grieux, but takes up with a rich man to escape poverty, and ends up being arrested as a prostitute. It's a dark tale about coercion and sexual violence that some might think steers "dangerously close to misery porn", said Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian. But "whatever your feeling about the content, the craft is consummate". MacMillan's pas de deux are "packed with inventive, unexpected steps and lifts that capture the insatiability of young love in "sweeping phrases that don't stop to breathe". And the execution is simply superb.

"One of the Royal Ballet's brightest stars, Hayward has a ravishing flow of movement, with mercurial speed and temperament," said Zoe Anderson in The Independent. "From the opulence of the brothel to her prison rags, her extraordinary presence shines out, disrupting everything around her." As Des Grieux, Marcelino Sambé is a revelation – and this "beautifully matched" pair fling themselves with abandon into MacMillan's "fiendish, high-velocity" choreography, said Siobhan Murphy in The Stage. It's a superlative evening, which – as the lovers meet their fate leaves the audience "gulping with admiration and emotion".