Mayerling: The Royal Ballet’s revival of MacMillan’s ‘revolutionary’ piece

Hirano and Osipova excel in a magnificently danced revival

(Image credit: © Helen Maybanks)

published 14 October 2022

When Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling premiered in 1978 it was “revolutionary”, said Sarah Crompton in The Observer – taking ballet into hitherto unexplored realms of “psychosis and misery”. It is based on real-life events, and although our protagonist is a prince, he is no “dreamboat”. Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, is riddled with syphilis, addicted to morphine, plotting against his father – and soon to die in a suicide pact with his teenage lover. More than 40 years on, the piece still feels “radical”, and the Royal Ballet’s magnificently danced revival is utterly “engrossing”. With a score of Liszt excerpts, and set design by Nicholas Georgiadis in “glowing autumnal colours, its imaginative, inventive confidence is truly astonishing”.

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To open the new Covent Garden season with Mayerling – the ultimate study in “aristocratic depravity” – is “certainly not playing it safe”, said Debra Craine in The Times. The ballet may have its faults (too many characters; too much plot), but it’s a “thrilling” test for dancers. Nowhere else will leading male stars “find psychosis and passion so painfully etched in graphic choreography that challenges their bodies as well as their acting chops”. On opening night, Ryoichi Hirano as Rudolf “got better and better as the emotional temperature rose” – and his disintegration was superb. But his various pas de deux with the many women in Rudolf’s life were the “stars of the show”: sinister, melancholic and erotic.

The production features several of the company’s biggest female stars and, across the board, the dancing is “exceptional”, said Louise Levene in the FT. Natalia Osipova is typically brilliant as Rudolf’s doomed lover, as is Francesca Hayward as his unfortunate bride – “criss-crossing the stage in a tremulous pas de bourrée”. And Laura Morera’s reading of Rudolf’s discarded mistress is “revelatory”. Her exchanges with Osipova in the fortune-telling scene are “every bit as thrilling as the love duets: two dance actresses at the very height of their powers”.