MANON
Forty years after its creation by Kenneth MacMillan, his big three-act ballet Manon opens the Royal Ballet’s new season with all the freshness and brilliance of a first staging. Based on Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel about the doomed love affair between the young girl meant for a convent, Manon, and her lover, the earnest student Des Grieux, MacMillan’s choreography, Jules Massenet’s music and Nicholas Georgiadis’s sets, combine to beguile us anew. From her first tentative steps out of the cocoon of her carriage into a Parisian inn, Marianela Nuñez never looks less than utterly convincing and radiant in the title role. Her partner, Federico Bonelli as Des Grieux, matches Nuñez’s talent with every movement of his elegant body so together they convince us of the purity of their love.
Georgiadis’s glorious designs, all autumn hues of soft ochre and burnished golds, nevertheless hint at the overbearing poverty that drives young ingénues like Manon to the brothel. Metaphorically and literally, the hanging tree branches of the Louisiana swamps, to which Manon is ultimately sent, are never far away. Debate goes on as to whether we should feel sympathy or disapproval towards Manon, but Nuñez elicits our sympathy. Before exposure to Parisian corruption sullies her, the young lovers dance a pas de deux in the privacy of their bedroom in which tenderness and passion seep out of Nuñez’s every movement.
Monsieur GM, the wealthy gentleman who lusts after Manon, is danced authoritatively by Christopher Saunders, his veneer of civilisation unpeeling rapidly as he murders Manon’s brother, the duplicitous Lescaut (Ricardo Cervera). MacMillan’s choreographic brilliance at depicting the darker side of human nature is given full airing here. The dancers seem to relish all the nastiness, the corps de ballet in fine fettle in the brothel, with Laura Morera tantalisingly flirtatious as Lescaut’s mistress.
Jules Massenet’s emotional and expressive score is well handled by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, under conductor Martin Yates, emphasising the dangerous seductiveness of the brothel with contrasting passages of melody in the embraces of the two lovers.
Particularly good is the vile Gaoler in Louisiana, superbly played by Gary Avis, who leaves the audience outraged at his treatment of Manon after she arrives, hair shorn and dressed in rags, labelled no better than a common prostitute.
Manon’s fall may not make happy viewing but the ballet’s power to move is undiminished by the passage of time.
Until 1 November at the Royal Opera House, Bow Street, Covent Garden, London WC2: 020-7304 4000, www.roh.org.uk – dancers can vary on different evenings.
There will be a live cinema relay to UK and worldwide cinemas on 16 October: www.roh.org.uk/cinema