I miss the faint hiss of a spinning foot: Royal Ballet – Live reviewed

Ballet lovers driven square-eyed by a drip feed of livestreaming and archive footage have been pining for the patter of tiny satin feet. Last month the UK’s big ballet companies began to emerge from hibernation, playing small-scale work to thin, socially distanced houses. Some, such as Birmingham Royal and English National ballets, took the opportunity to broaden their audience’s conservative tastes with otherwise tricky-to-shift programmes of new work. Others, like the Royal and Northern ballets, offered choreographic comfort food.

After testing the waters with last month’s Back on Stage gala, danced before an audience of 400 dance students and health workers, the Royal Ballet began its autumn season with two programmes selected from its vast back catalogue. Sadly, thanks to the new lockdown, its first night was also its last.

The one-off mixed bill was a generous blend of the two planned programmes, devised to give maximum value for ticket holders and maximum stage time for stars and soloists. Act I was a crowded charm bracelet of solos, duets and trios and Act II a rousing rerun of the new jumbo staging of Kenneth MacMillan’s dance hall dance-off Elite Syncopations.

Bag searches, track and trace and a terror threat recently upped to ‘severe’ could easily have had us queueing all the way to the Aldwych, but Covent Garden’s front-of-house team rose to the challenge with unsuspected grace and efficiency and everyone was greeted and seated by 7 p.m.

Sadler’s Wells had managed to keep its bars open for BRB’s London comeback the previous week but the Opera House stayed dry. It was hard for a masked audience of 950 with no gin inside it to generate the kissy-kissy buzz usually found in Covent Garden’s bars and foyers but the atmosphere in the auditorium was affectionate and excited as director Kevin O’Hare made his curtain speech of welcome.