Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

MacMillan’s #MeToo minefield

This should be Rudolf’s piece but in the Royal Ballet’s latest revival the Crown Prince is outshone by the women

Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling is a #MeToo minefield. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary is a serial seducer, a man of many mistresses, a grabber of princesses. Were he alive and kissing today, he’d check himself into an Arizona rehab clinic. In 1889, it was laudanum and a loaded pistol.

Rudolf ought to be tormented, driven by ennui and the oppression of the imperial court to darker and darker thrills. Ryoichi Hirano, who opens the Royal Ballet’s 2018/19 season as the Crown Prince, is not dark enough. It is his debut as Rudolf and his performance is studied and contained. Hirano is handsome, tall, Apollonian. He was electrifying in MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations opposite Yasmine Naghdi last year in a swinging dance that suited the pendulum polish of his long limbs. Here he has no edge of melancholy madness. Where he ought to be brooding, a powerful man thwarted, he is merely irked, as if the barber had forgotten his preferred scent of pomade. In the final scene, he is ragged, not ruined. Edward Watson, who is presently injured and who Hirano replaces, is a master of troubled parts. Tension thrums through Watson; Hirano barely quivers. But it was his first shot, at short rehearsal notice, and he will gain confidence.

He is outshone by Mayerling’s women: by Francesca Hayward as Rudolf’s wronged wife Princess Stephanie; by Kristen McNally as his mother Empress Elisabeth; by Sarah Lamb as his former lover Countess Marie Larisch; by Marianela Nunez as a courtesan; and by Natalia Osipova as the 17-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera with whom he dies in a fateful suicide pact. The bodies of the real Rudolf and Mary were discovered in the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna woods on 30 January 1889.

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