Kenneth MacMillan's brooding masterpiece is now 40 years old but has lost none of it's power to unsettle - luckily there are two intervals for you to exhale after the pressure-cooker atmosphere his choreography engenders. The bleakness of the tale of Crown Prince Rudolf and his teenage mistress Mary Vetsera casts a strange, disturbing atmosphere.
Rudolf was a death-obsessed womanizer addicted to morphine and addled with syphilis. His politically expedient marriage to Princess Stephanie of Belgium left both miserable but his wish to separate was refused by his parents Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Elizabeth which was jaw-dropping hypocrisy as they both had lovers and lived separate lives.
Countess Marie Larisch, a former mistress and one of his mother's ladies-in-waiting, knew Mary Vetsera's mother and, as they both wanted advancement at court, they affected an introduction between the 30 year-old Prince and 17 year-old Mary, who was obsessed with him. After a secret three month affair, he invited her to the royal hunting lodge of Mayerling. Mary probably knew why - she left a letter saying they were going together into an uncertain beyond - but the result was two dead bodies and a revolver.
MacMillan's ballet begins and ends with Vetsera's secret, moonlit burial in a monastery cemetery - in real-life a ghoulish affair where her corpse was driven in a carriage to the site, wedged between her two uncles with a broomstick pushed down the back of her coat and a hat covering the bullet wound in the back of her head. Her uncertain beyond was to be written out of history initially while Rudolf was mourned supposedly dying of a heart rupture. But eventually their dangerous liaison was revealed...
Thankfully Kenneth MacMillan wasn't in the mood to make Rudolf and Mary tragic victims of a devastating love or a cruel world who refused them happiness as in the film versions of the story; all the characters in his ballet are presented with a clear-eyed realism which makes it hard to sympathize with them but you remain riveted as the lovers pirouette closer to their abyss.
Steven McRae was remarkable as the narcissistic Rudolf, seeming to dance at times to crazed music playing in his own head, emanating an icy disdain for all around him seemingly not connecting with anyone, you suspect that for McRae's Rudolf even Vetsera was simply a means to an end.
Akane Takada danced the role of Mary and did so with a technical precision but I never felt any particular heat from her, the last time I saw it Lauren Cuthbertson danced the role and had been violently passionate. Meaghan Grace Hinkis was a suitably scared Princess Stephanie and there was the usual very good work from Kristen McNally as the Empress Elizabeth and Laura Morera as the scheming Countess Marie Larisch.
It's a ballet where the best roles are the women's but Luca Acri was very good as Bratfisch, Rudolf's coach-driver, who has a great solo in the tavern scene which he repeats for the doomed couple in the final scene but falters and stops when he realizes nothing can distract them from their deadly solipsism.
The revival is again staged by Christopher Saunders, Grant Coyle and Karl Burnett and the late Nicholas Georgiades set designs are still wonderfully evocative. However it's the presence of MacMillan that pervades the whole production, for both his artistic and choreographic brilliance and the sadder thought that it was during a 1992 revival of MAYERLING that he collapsed and died alone backstage at Covent Garden from a heart attack.
