Does a tart like Manon have a place in the Royal Ballet repertoire?

What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon opened the new ballet season. Kenneth MacMillan’s gold-digger turns 40 this year but her promiscuous allure shows no signs of failing punters with money to burn on sex thrills. I once took my partner to see Sylvie Guillem as Manon. His verdict was, ‘Too immoral’. I guess he got MacMillan’s point rather well. Manon has no heart at all, she is deliciously low.

Since 1974 she has dodged bullets when powers-that-be proposed that a conscienceless tart had no place in the Royal repertoire. But ballerinas led the defence, seeing that this was one of the supreme female roles, so fascinatingly refracted is her inconstancy in her choreography and Nicholas Georgiadis’s dresses (even the prison outfit is sexy). Gillian Revie, a superb MacMillan girl, once told me how amazed the choreographer was when, as she sat at the stage door waiting for a friend, every single passing man stopped to speak to her. ‘How do you do that?’ he asked her. Pheromones, presumably — of which Revie evidently had plenty. All the male hands that grope and paw Manon show MacMillan’s skill in illustrating choreographically what men feel about certain wild-child women. Manon’s way of only walking on pointe, delicately, through the Parisian shit is another brilliant motif.

Succeeding the great recently departed Manons — Tamara Rojo and Alina Cojocaru to ENB, Guillem to her own devices — the golden-haired Marianela Nuñez, who opened this new run, is gloriously beautiful. She resembles the Darnley portrait of Elizabeth I (why doesn’t someone make a baroque Elizabeth ballet for her?) but she is only fitfully exciting. She remains a ballerina in a role, rather than a strange, magnetic creature wreaking havoc around her.