KENNETH MACMILLAN Triple Bill at Covent Garden: 25 years on, the passion remains...

It's now 25 years since the choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan suffered a fatal heart-attack backstage at Covent Garden during a revival of his production MAYERLING and since that tragic event his ballets such as ROMEO AND JULIET, MANON, ANASTASIA, MAYERLING etc. have been revived and re-interpreted by a new generation of dancers in many different companies.  So when Kevin O'Hare, director of the Royal Ballet, saw the Northern Ballet production of ROMEO AND JULIET, it struck him how the upcoming 25th anniversary of his death should be on a wider scale than just his company.

With the agreement of MacMillan's widow Deborah, the season included the Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Northern Ballet, Scottish Ballet and the Yorke Dance Project coming together to give a nationwide appreciation of his enduring legacy.

Of the five events we selected the one which showed the range of MacMillan's choreography: the elegiac GLORIA, the thrilling and disturbing THE JUDAS TREE and the playful, colourful world of ELITE SYNCOPATIONS.

The first of the one-act ballets was MacMillan's GLORIA, premiered in 1980, which was danced by Northern Ballet.  It had been inspired the previous year when MacMillan watched the BBC series TESTAMENT OF YOUTH based on Vera Brittan's memoir of her experiences as a field nurse in World War I and in particular, the loss of her fiancée, her brother and their two best friends.  MacMillan was moved by her story and also by the memory of his father's involvement in the battle of The Somme which his father refused to talk about in the years after. 

He chose Francis Poulenc's Gloria in G Major as his music and the abstract choreography of the male and female dancers in a barren desolate landscape is counterpoint to the music's glorifying of God; it makes for a good distillation of the sacrifice of life against the vaunted ideals of what they were doing it for.  It was well danced but with no particular stand-out performances.

The second ballet was MacMillan's controversial THE JUDAS TREE from 1992, the last ballet that he completed for the Royal Ballet.  Set to an unsettling score by Brian Ellis, the ballet concerns the mysterious appearance of a scantily-clad woman on a London building site where a group of builders work like a dangerous, suspicious pack of animals. MacMillan's thrilling and highly-charged choreography is constantly shifting the power balance: one minute the woman is, literally, walking all over them as she delights in her female power over them but that changes on a toe-twirl to her being victimized by the men, the brutish foreman and his two young friends. 

One is always gentler with her and this ultimately leads to an explosion of violence in which the woman is beaten then gang-raped by the gang then murdered.  The quieter man, who did not take part in the wilding, tries to assimilate with the others but is rejected violently. In a sudden volte-face the foreman crawls along a crane arm and hangs himself where he is observed by the woman, her head covered Magdalene-like. The curtain-call felt like an almost grudging, muted ovation.  However it's power to rivet the attention cannot be denied and the committed performances by Thiago Soares as the Foreman, the remarkable Edward Watson as his gentle friend and, above all, the extraordinary Lauren Cuthbertson as the woman.

The final ballet was MacMillan's 1974 souffle ELITE SYNCOPATIONS, a set of party-piece routines danced to Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.  With eye-popping costume designs and the relaxed air of a cast party onstage, it was a delightful way to end the show and included guest soloists from Birmingham, Northern and Scottish ballets, with delightful turns from Laura Morera, Yasmine Naghdi, Ryoichi Hirano and Kevin Poeung.

But the troubled shadows of THE JUDAS TREE continued to linger in my mind and, although ELITE SYNCOPATIONS was a fine example of the lighter side of MacMillan's talent, THE JUDAS TREE is the one that will stay with me.  The 25th Anniversary season is over now but MacMillan's MANON will be at the Opera House next year.