Liam Scarlett's enduring legacy: Royal Ballet's Swan Lake reviewed

Without fanfare or apology, the Royal Ballet appears to have rehabilitated Liam Scarlett, but what a tragic balls-up it has been. In 2019, having been accused of unspecified sexual misconduct, the choreographer and his work were cancelled both at Covent Garden and abroad. An internal report into his activities has never been published, so rumours and allegations persist, but the official line exonerated him without explanation. Shockingly, Scarlett killed himself last April.

Now he has been restored, smilingly pictured without mention of any unpleasantness in the programme book for the Royal Ballet’s current revival of his production of Swan Lake. There’s been a chaotic cover-up, and it’s just not good enough.

How much talent did he have? I never sensed creative genius, though his first big success Asphodel Meadows was a perfectly agreeable pastorale. Subsequent efforts such as Frankenstein and Sweet Violets misfired, to put it kindly. Yet there could be no question of his skill and potential (he died when he was barely 35), and my guess is that his largely traditional reading of Swan Lake will prove his enduring legacy.

My guess is that his largely traditional reading of Swan Lake will prove Scarlett’s enduring legacy

Quibbles are inevitable. I’m irritated by his emphasis on the dramatically redundant role of the prince’s chum Benno and what amounts to a repetition of the Act One pas de trois in Act Three. Promoting the dastardly sorcerer Von Rothbart to the post of court chamberlain raises more questions than it answers. And the downbeat ending, with Siegfried left carrying a lifeless body, strikes a false note that runs counter to Tchaikovsky’s redemptive music. But there’s plenty of atmosphere and spectacle in John Macfarlane’s designs – audiences get their money’s worth of gilt in Act Three – and Scarlett has honoured what little we know of Petipa and Ivanov’s original conception.