Rupert Christiansen

A spectacular failure: Royal Ballet’s MaddAddam reviewed

Plus: why Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring is overrated

The sets, lighting and video are all highly sophisticated but the dance is a wretch muddle: Wayne McGregor's MaddAddam. Image: ©Karolina Kuras 
issue 23 November 2024

Adapting ballets out of plot-heavy novels set in fantasy locations and populated with multiple characters is a rubbish idea. The profound truth of such a proposal is forcefully borne out by the wretched muddle of Wayne McGregor’s MaddAddam, an over-inflated farrago drawn from a triptych of visionary fictions by Margaret Atwood.

McGregor – hugely talented and energetic as he is – needs to calm down and slow down and think small

Where to start? Apocalyptic themes – political, environmental and ‘societal’ – are evoked in images and spoken narration without McGregor having any means in his hyperactive choreographic vocabulary to translate them meaningfully into dance. Only those who are already au fait with Atwood’s extremely complex and wilfully ambiguous narratives will be able to penetrate, let alone navigate, what the hell is going on.

The first act takes place in the aftermath of a pandemic in which a figure known as the Snowman leads a posse of engineered hominids out into a depopulated world. The second act moves back and forth chronologically, focusing on an ‘eco-pacifist’ sect called God’s Gardeners who float about benignly in white underwear. The third act, set ‘some generations after the Waterless Flood’, shows the hominids crossed with humans, a new race, very agitated about something unspecific.

If this sounds intriguing, I can only say that it represents the very maximum of sense that I could draw out of the extended synopsis in the programme – I haven’t a clue where Blanco or Blackbeard or the Painballers or Pigoons fit in – and that’s because McGregor has everyone moving in the same idiom, with contortions made up of violent stretching and pelvic jerking. The result is that it’s impossible to work out whose side one is meant to be on, or indeed what emotion anyone is feeling. Dance is wonderfully and bottomlessly expressive, of course, but it cannot bear the weight that this scenario dumps on it.

Trying to find something nice to say, I would admit that the quality of some wonderful dancers – Fumi Kaneko, Melissa Hamilton, Joseph Sissens, and Marco Masciari among them – briefly shines through the mess.

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