Sex, Violence, and Kenneth MacMillan

<First published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2003.>

Several of the biggest scandals of the Royal Ballet's history attach to the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. Scandals about matters integral to ballet: subject-matter, casting, music. The climax of his 1960 ballet The Invitation is a rape. What begins, disturbingly enough, as mutual attraction between an unhappily married man and an innocent, curious, teenage girl suddenly turns ugly as the man's attraction changes into merely brutal lust. The girl -  wrapped belt-like around his waist as he, back to the audience, reaches sexual climax - mimes one of the many silent howls that mark MacMillan's choreography. In the early 1960s, this was shocking enough that audiences in the regions had to be warned in advance of its disturbing con-tent. (The ballet outlived the scandal. It stayed in regular repertory until 1977, and it still made an impact when last revived in the 1990s.)

After the premiere of MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet (1965), Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev took a number of curtain calls unprecedented for a new ballet. But soon after the opening night it emerged that MacMillan had not made the title roles on them and had not wanted them to dance the premiere. "His" Juliet and Romeo in rehearsal had been Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable — much more tearaway, angry, inspired by both Zeffirelli's famous 1960 Old Vic production as well as West Side Story - and force majeure had been applied to impose the most famous partnership in world ballet onto his new ballet as its first cast. When their turn came, Seymour and Gable were acclaimed too (unlike any other new ballet the company had seen, Romeo and Juliet was scheduled from the start the way the old ballet classics were, with no fewer than five star casts billed to take turns in the leading roles in its opening season alone); but this demotion was a harder knock than any rising star needs. Nureyev and the New York impresario Sol Hurok were probably the chief machinators behind it; but both Frederick Ashton, as the Royal Ballet's artistic director, and MacMillan himself could (should?) have fought for the important principle of giving an opening night to the dancers on whom the ballet had been made. In this case, MacMillan was both victim and agent. He had sacrificed his chosen dancers because Hurok et al. were guaranteeing him (aged thirty-five) a box-office smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Until then, Romeo and Juliet had been associated in London and New York with the legendary Bolshoi production - and in fact he successfully encouraged even his fifth-cast Juliet to make a vividly individual interpretation of the role, quite distinct from either Fonteyn's or Seymour's divergent archetype; and his Romeo has remained a cornerstone of Royal repertory ever since. Nonetheless, once his success was sure, MacMillan went on complaining about his treatment up to the last years of his life.

Back in 1959, when MacMillan (born in 1929) had applied to choreograph Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde on the Royal Ballet, the board at Covent Garden had rejected the idea on grounds of the music's unsuitability for choreography.* This occurred despite the fact that Antony Tudor had choreographed his celebrated Dark Elegies to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder in 1938, and that it had been a staple item in the repertories of both Ballet Rambert and American Ballet Theatre ever since. So, in 1965, just months after the premiere of his Romeo, MacMillan made his Mahler ballet instead on the Stuttgart Ballet and had such a triumph with it that, within the year, the Royal Ballet invited him to restage The Song of the Earth at Covent Garden, in whose repertory it has featured ever since. (The Royal Ballet's founder, Ninette de Valois, was moved to write a poem about MacMillan's ballet; Ashton, her successor as artistic director, said in the last year of his life that he thought it MacMillan's finest work.) MacMillan had achieved two of the biggest successes of the era and had suffered two of the biggest rebuffs. He left the Royal Ballet in 1966 to work as artistic director of the Berlin Ballet. Seymour, the most original ballerina ever to have joined the Royal Ballet, went with him. Christopher Gable stayed, but in 1967 left ballet altogether.

When MacMillan came back to Britain, it was to succeed Frederick Ashton in 1970 as the Royal Ballet's artistic director. Ashton was as establishment as artists come, and his ballets were impeccably, brilliantly, crafted; MacMillan had been the Angry Young Man of ballet, and his ballets invariably contained various flaws of construction. Many people (especially in New York, where the Royal Ballet had been enjoying stellar biennial seasons since 1949) could not tolerate him at the company's helm; and he continued to encounter trouble at the highest level. In 1976, when he applied to choreograph Faure's Requiem, history repeated itself. The Royal Opera House board rejected his request as musically unsuitable (some of its Catholic members, led by John Pope Hennessy, were particularly alarmed). He choreographed the ballet on the Stuttgart and had another hit. Seven years later, he revived it on the Royal Ballet, where it has remained in repertory. For the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, he used the choral dances from Benjamin Britten's Gloriana (an opera that the Queen was already known not to have enjoyed in her 1953 Coronation season) to show the first Queen Elizabeth (Lynn Seymour, again), in a skirtless farthingale frame, cavorting in sexually suggestive terms with a whole retinue of cavaliers. At the VIP reception afterwards, MacMillan was cold-shouldered by almost every bigwig except Denis Healey. His 1973 production of The Sleeping Beauty had not been a great success. Though he had always been encouraged by Ninette de Valois, he found in 1977 that she, aged seventy-eight, had gone to the powers at Covent Garden behind his back to submit her proposal for her own new production of this classic, and that it had been accepted. MacMillan resigned with almost immediate effect.

The scandals went on. Though he remained at Covent Garden as the Royal's resident choreographer, he went on making ballets that "the establishment" didn't want to see, and he often timed them to arrive at the least opportune moment. He was entitled to make a ballet about the Isadora "I am the enemy of ballet" Duncan, but why did he need to make his full-length Isadora to celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of the Royal Ballet's foundation? (It is the only ballet at Covent Garden whose premiere I remember being booed.) He not only choreographed the garden of the Finzi-Continis, he choreographed the gas-chambers too (Valley of Shadows, 1982). Not that they were a scandal: MacMillan had acclimatised his audience to uncomfortable subject matter by then. He had made a Diary of Anne Frank ballet (The Burrow) in 1958: since when he had gone on to cover the Russian Revolution and nervous breakdown (Anastasia, 1971), psychosis, syphilis, morphine addiction, and sexual double standards at the Habsburg court (Mayerling, 1978), and plenty more. He was particularly drawn to unromanticised aspects of heterosexual intercourse, to abnormal psychology, and to exposing the dark underbelly of royalist or oligarchical societies. And from early in his career - probably starting with his 1957 Solitaire, a beloved repertory item for many years - it was common critical currency (with his approval) to discuss many of the protagonists of his ballets as "Outsider" figures.

Today, these MacMillan scandals sound positively edifying. He's now widely spoken of as an artist of audacity and compassion, who enlarged ballet by deprettifying it and by forcing upon it new aspects of seriousness. But he shrank it, too. The palette of movement from which he drew became coarser, as did the strokes with which he employed it. By the mid-1970s, not even the old fogeys were seriously shocked by the sex and violence in MacMillan's ballets. One Colonel Blimp, bright-eyed on the opening night of Mayerling, was heard to say after Act One had ended on a scene of wedding-night gunfire, skull-wielding terror, and marital rape, "normally fall asleep during this sort of thing but not tonight!"

In time, scandal switched from MacMillan's seriousness of artistic intention to the embarrassing patchiness of his work and the paucity of his dance language. Some of his ballets contained acres of waste padding (if the Imperial scenes in the first two acts of Anastasia had gone on any longer, they would have had dances for the Imperial dog and the Imperial cat) while many of them simply couldn't express what they wanted to. Nobody looking at Mayerling can ever have thought that its four male Hungarian officers are successfully communicating the cause of Hungarian secession. The way they emerge from a curtain, waylay Crown Prince Rudolf on his way through the palace on his wedding night, catch him in successive half-Nelsons, and lean upon him while gesturing whispers into his ear, it looks as if they're blackmailing him about some sexual episode in his past: presumably one in which they participated.

MacMillan had some enemies and many detractors from the 1950s on, and the ineptness of such passages made him an easy target for them. You could turn from his work to that of George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and, in modern dance, Martha Graham, all of whom were choreographing throughout most of MacMillan's career; and the comparison not only made MacMillan seem a more flawed and less substantial artist but also heavily in debt to all of them. Known to be morbidly sensitive to criticism, he made matters worse by sometimes rounding on even some of his most loyal supporters - biting the hand that had petted him for the last thirty years. Whereas the senior Ashton had been generous enough not to restage his own Romeo (made in 1955 for the Royal Danish Ballet) at Covent Garden once MacMillan had expressed an interest in creating his own new version, and whereas, when MacMillan announced his plan to choreograph Poulenc's Gloria, Ashton, an artist more akin to Poulenc in several respects, dropped his own ambition to choreograph that score, MacMillan was considerably less generous to younger choreographers. If there was even a rumour that a younger choreographer was interested in choreographing Stravinsky's Pulcinella or Britten's Prince of the Pagodas, he let it be known that, at Covent Garden, these scores must "belong" to him — even though he never did choreograph the former and though his eventual, long-delayed 1989 production of the Britten three-acter was very spotty in dance inspiration.

But, for all his flaws of execution and of character, you couldn't laugh MacMillan away. Ashton - though not above making bitchy remarks about MacMillan's more infelicitous choreography - certainly didn't. When he saw the weird and vicious characters of My Brother, My Sisters (a ballet in which the Bronte children overlap with Lord of the Flies), he responded so fully that he recommended the ballet to everyone he knew. Even though My Brother, My Sisters (made on the Stuttgart Ballet in 1978, taken into Royal Ballet repertory in 1980) was one of the MacMillan ballets that Ashtonophiles found easiest to knock, Ashton's own readiness to praise had a direct effect on its initial success in Royal Ballet repertory.

You still can't laugh MacMillan away. About his best work, there remains a kind of dignity, a lived sincerity of detail, that transcends his limitations. My own favourite is Mayerling (1978). This is a ballet that, in some dramatic respects, I care about in the way that I care about Verdi's Don Carlos - and not just because they're both full-length works about Habsburg crown princes with Oedipal problems and leftwing political sympathies. Mayerling is dedicated to Ashton, and, though it is mainly striking for its un-Ashtonian features, its most remarkable feature is one for which Ashton was famous: it seems astoundingly truthful to the real-life events it reports (cf. Ashton's 1968 tableau of Elgar at home in Enigma Variations), you're mostly persuaded by its interpretation of history, and its characters have a life that carries on in your head after the fall of the curtain. Like Don Carlos with Eboli, Mayerling has a second heroine, the prince's scheming ex-mistress Marie Larisch, who knows how dangerous she can be and who ends up being banished. When I discovered that the real-lite Marie Larisch is one of the voices in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land ("And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight"), it seemed only natural; in Mayerling, there is even an important snow scene in which Marie Larisch plays a vital part.

The interaction between secondary characters (reminiscent again of Don Carlos) makes Mayerling by far the most richly-textured of MacMillan's ballets. When Rudolf's mother, the Empress Elisabeth, finds Marie Larisch in her son's room, apparently in his arms, and finds that Marie has been (at least) condoning his morphine habit, she banishes her; and among the ballet's most loaded moments is Marie's quiet, slow, telling exit. Slowly, ruefully, ironically, even slyly, she curtseys to him — while placing her finger to her lips to indicate that his secrets remain safe. I have been crushed; and the fall of the Habsburg Empire will follow in due course; so let us set history in motion; and meanwhile let us preserve appearances. As Marie leaves the room (and the ballet, she pushes in Mary Vetsera to take her place: the young mistress (introduced to him by Marie, some scenes before with whom he has already found the morbid erotic-psychotic relationship he craves and with whom he will now go to Mayerling to die. For such characters, such moments, we can readily accept a few misleading Hungarians earlier on.

MacMillan died in 1992, backstage at Covent Garden, during the performance of Mayerling with which the Royal Ballet opened its 1992-1993 sea-son. His wite Deborah has now become a vigilant power widow in the manner of Cosima Wagner and Alma Mahler. Most MacMillan ballets remain in exceptionally good shape, and she has sanctioned or conceived posthumous revisions to some of them, so that they still seem works in progress. During the late 1990s, Anastasia was cut and redesigned; design revisions were made to The Invitation; Different Drummer (1984) has been relit; cuts have been attempted in Manon (1974); nearly-forgotten rarities, Triad (1972) and Rituals (1975), have been revived. The current 2002-03 season has seen an international celebration of his work. New productions of different ballets by him have been staged in Montreal, San Francisco, Milan, Copenhagen; existing productions have been revived in Paris, Washington, and New York; exhibitions have marked his work at both the Royal Opera House and at the Theatre Museum (the latter is called The Outsider); Mayerling was revived on the exact tenth anniversary of his death.

Full-length ballets are increasingly popular these days, and, in the absence of a living choreographer who can make new ones to catch the imagination, MacMillan's have become a boom industry. Manon, thought by many to have been a failure at its 1974 premiere, is now danced by ballet companies on several continents; Mayerling is now danced by the Royal Swedish Ballet too; and his Romeo and Juliet, now over thirty-eight years old and danced by companies from Russia to the States, has effectively become the world's definitive production.

To watch these and other MacMillan ballets again at Covent Garden this season has been to be struck anew by the essential difficultness of MacMillan's artistic character. The controversial nature of his work goes deeper than the scandals during his lifetime. MacMillan made one argue, still makes one argue, about the most crucial and enduringly controversial ingredients of ballet: its choice of music and response to music, its presentation of women and sex, its capacity to convey matters psychological or bluntly realistic. Just what was MacMillan trying to express? And what do the facts of his choreography actually express? The two things often seemed, still seem, very different.

There are extensive passages of The Song of the Earth where, the more MacMillan responds to Mahler's music and the words, the more feckless his dance looks. In the long final Farewell, the singer recounts a first-person-singular tale of how "My friend" arrives to announce his farewell from life. To the slowly delivered German words "Er sprach, seine Stimme war umfort: Du meine Freund..." ("He spoke, and his tones were veiled: ‘O my friend...’”), MacMillan gives us very precisely timed mime gestures and a perplexing ménage à trois that show (a) that the person doing the speaking is not the protagonist's friend/lover but the spectral Messenger of Death (b) that his tones aren't muffled but repeatedly shouted, as if to the winds (c) that both the protagonist and her lover are nonetheless straining to catch his message. Yet, as the words proceed, the Messenger then stops being the teller; and indeed there's no message to be understood. (Except the one we've understood all along: You're going to die.) The lover has already made his dance farewell, in the strenuous, too metronomic, duet that MacMillan sets to the long Funeral March in the middle of this song. The best parts of this ballet are when MacMillan draws less close to individual words. When he depicts the loneliness of the protagonist, passing in bleak isolation through changing communities and landscapes (the changing perspectives, paths, and imagery of the choreography here include some of MacMillan's most haunting inventions), he catches a central image both of Mahler's song-cycle and of his own "outsider" motif.

After the original musical controversies of The Song of the Earth and Requiem, the powers that be at Covent Garden let him choreograph Poulenc's Gloria in 1980, and the ballet he achieved has widely been acclaimed as one of his masterpieces. Its basic concept, surely modeled after Britten's War Requiem, is eloquent enough. Ghosts revisit the trenches of the First World War and re-visit the situations of their sad lives - all ironically set against a liturgical text that says "Glory be to God."The main scenario of the ballet - principally in the relationship of the main heroine and the two men in her life - is inspired by Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (at the time of Gloria's premiere, we had all just been following the TV adaptation). But when the music speeds up, MacMillan gives us happy choreography (the ballet's second heroine is cheerfully thrown about by men in some very chirpy acrobatic partnering) which dissolves the ballet's initial irony. On one occasion he actually stages a Calvary scene, with the main heroine and her two main partners being held aloft by others like Christ and the two thieves, each cruci-form: an image that makes no sense in terms either of the music or the rest of the stage action.

More objectionable than that (and very far from Vera Brittain) is the terrible passivity of Gloria's chief heroine. She droops her way through the ballet, usually over the arm of one man or two, not because of any apparent grief but because she is from the outset a victim, a helpless, pliant, pretty doll. Both women in this ballet are further complicated by the uncertainty of the sexual implications of MacMillan's way with partnering. That second woman: is she sexually aroused or naive in the way she flings herself about with groups of men? We can't be sure, and we can be even less sure whether the main heroine knows what on earth she's doing when one pas de trois keeps manipulating her through various contorted figures until finally, held like open scissors with arms and legs apart, she is impaled between her two partners, their torsos pressing into, respectively, her crotch and head.

Danses Concertantes (1955) shows us that the twenty-five-year-old MacMillan might have become another artist altogether. By the highest standards, this choreography is rather too busy. Nor do its incidents add up powerfully in terms of overall architecture. But it remains a startling, impressive, academically virtuoso outpouring of pure-dance invention. The strokes in which it seems to have learnt from Ashton and Balanchine are always surpassed by those in which it makes witty effects of its own, and enduringly it catches the debonair chic of the mid-1950s. Watching this, his first professional ballet, one can't help asking: Has there been a single young ballet choreographer since 1955 who has announced his talent with such panache?

And then one asks: Why did MacMillan change? Some of the answers may become apparent when Jann Parry's biography comes out. But they won't stop the arguments. My own biggest problems with MacMillan have been to do with his sheer clumsiness, both with expression and with the medium of dance. But it is easiest today to argue about his presentation of women.

There are ballets in which MacMillan's women are rebellious, sympathetic, engaged. The main reason to see his Romeo is to see his Juliet. I have often sat out Act Two, during which she makes just one brief non-dance appearance, but in Act Three, during which she is hardly ever offstage, she carries the audience's heart with her impulsiveness, her decisiveness, her recklessness. Even so, especially in Act One, one has to cope with MacMillan's tiresome dualism of prudish, repressed townswomen versus fun-loving harlots - a dualism that occurs in far too many of his ballets. And there are other ballets - Gloria is among them — in which MacMillan treats women like plasticine.

Or like unresisting victims; or gluttons for punishment. During Act One of Manon, the heroine chooses des Grieux for love and then chooses to leave him for money; but in the next two acts others keep making her decisions for her. Act Two ends with a largely repetitious pas de deux about choice - does she want des Grieux, to whom she has returned, or does she want the sparkling bracelet she has earnt? - and what makes it especially feeble is that MacMillan then takes the choice literally out of her hands. Des Grieux, not she, makes her mind up for her; he rips the bracelet off her wrist, so that he is all she has left. When Lynn Seymour, the fifth-cast Manon, stepped into this ballet in 1975, she changed this episode, to the ballet's great gain. She, not des Grieux, made the crucial, angry, decision to tear off the bracelet and give herself up to love alone. (It was with a Seymour performance of Manon that MacMillan ended his regime as the Royal Ballet's artistic director in 1977) But, even though Seymour now helps to coach the ballet, her interpretative decision on that point has been overruled or ignored. Today's Manons get bullied by des Grieux and by every other man. Maybe the victimhood of women is the point? But over three acts a nasty edge of masochism sets in.

One moment has more force today than when the ballet was young, It occurs during the final pas de deux. In the swamps of Louisiana, the dying Manon dances one last time with des Grieux. He lifts, spins, tosses, catches her. Here is another of MacMillan's acrobatic pas de deux, far more spectacular than substantial, but various ballerinas - Antoinette Sibley, Merle Park, Natalia Makarova, Seymour, Altynai Assylmuratova - have kept the dramatic tension going to the end in various ways: Manon can sail high in frenzy, cling to love as the one true value in her life, alternate between despair and my-will-be-done defiance, find liebestod transfiguration. (Sylvie Guillem today acts it with real force, but I find her dancing intolerably toneless.) But I have never seen any Manon go to death so limply as this season's debutante Alina Cojocaru; and Tamara Rojo was also distinctly passive. With both these Manons, I noticed here an incident when des Grieux, having flipped her body this way and that, suddenly rams his pelvis between her legs, as if taking her from behind. What makes this so weird is that this is the first sign of explicit sexual congress between them during the whole ballet. Now you're dying, now I'm throwing you about as never before, now I'll have you.

You can argue that MacMillan didn't intend these sexual or sadomasochistic aspects of Manon and Gloria. But he certainly did elsewhere. The Judas Tree, one of his last ballets, is the one that currently causes most argument. Set on a modern London building site (Canary Wharf visible in the background), it shows a girl variously goading men until they gang-rape her - during which assault she dies; the man most central to the rape then hangs himselt; whereupon she rises from the dead, still lingering as he dangles from his rope. (Discuss.) An actor friend this season pointed out this ballet's resemblance to Harold Pinter's The Homecoming; here, as there, the woman is astoundingly complicit and provocative in her sexual dealings with the men. But Pinter's 1963 heroine survives, and though she lets her husband go, it isn't the death of him. By contrast, death is the idea MacMillan can't leave alone.

Characters in dance theatre have been dying for centuries. But even when you know the Sylphide's blind and wingless farewell to life, the Swan Queen's self-immolating leap offstage into the wings (i.e. into the lake), and whichever factors (madness, a weak heart, dancing too much, plunging a sword into her heart, betrayal in love) contribute to the still vexed issue of Giselle's death, it remains startling just how much death there is in MacMillan's ballets, and how much dancing the dying characters get to do. Romeo takes the dead-seeming body of Juliet, partners it, lifts it, drags it. The heroine of The Song of the Earth makes her prolonged farewell to life, reaching one climax in the intense funeral-march pas de deux with a lover who, it then emerges, will be claimed by the Messenger of Death before she is; the ballet reaches its close with all three heroine, her now "dead" lover, and the Messenger — slowly advancing towards us in a tranquil limbo. The heroine of Manon finds her ambiguous death in the arms of des Grieux; in Mayerling, Crown Prince Rudolf eventually finds in Mary Vetsera the lover whose morbidity, passion, and psychosis match his, who will join him in the most acrobatic of all sexual pas de deux before their double suicide. The characters of Gloria return from death to relive the loves and relationships of their mortal lives before returning to their graves. In Valley of Shadows, the action alternates between the garden of the Finzi-Continis (set to Tchaikovsky music) and the gas chambers (set to Martinů); the former gradually empties, the latter gradually fills, its denizens all doing the same danced unison shudder.

I think it's too crude to label all this (and there's more) as necrophilia, but you can see why some ballet people do so. MacMillan choreographed like a thanatomane, and sex and violence were natural ingredients to him. In Mayerling, all the elements came together in one heady brew. Romeo's behaviour with the dead Juliet is relatively simple, and it's easy to find it romantically affecting, especially if you notice echoes in it of the way he partnered her when she was fully alive and responsive. Elsewhere, however, MacMillan's preoccupation with the dying and the dead feels like a clumsy idée fixe, one that adds up to a meaning beyond that of any individual ballet. It is, I think, the angry wail of the true passive aggressive. You'll miss me when I'm gone; you mistreated me right up to my death; when I was alive, I was the outsider, but when I die I will be part of you; whatever love you had for me was the wrong love and it couldn't keep me alive. This cumulative message, larger than one's compassion for any individual MacMillan character, was often deeply irritating when he was alive. Now that he has been dead for more than ten years, it remains irksome. And yet, and yet: we do miss him. The scene is smaller without him.

Act Two, Scene One of Manon occurs in an hôtel particulier where all kinds of women are available, as is an ambiguous "garçonne" figure. She mainly dances the same steps, on pointe, as the other harlots— yet she's in boy's costume, and she dances a provocative mini-solo. The role was created for Jennifer Jackson; this season, I asked her about it. She told me that, when MacMillan had made it, she (then only in her second season with the Royal Ballet) had assumed that she was just another of the scene's many loose women. So, when she had received the boy's costume (designed for her by Nicholas Georgiadis), she assumed that there was some mistake. She went to MacMillan to inquire: What kind of role am I meant to be dancing? MacMillan slyly took her aside and told her: "You're more expensive."

@Alastair Macaulay