Notes on a scandal

How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer Sargent’s magnetic, enigmatic portrait of Madame X, all alabaster skin, black dress and arrogantly sexy profile. A Mark-Anthony Turnage-commissioned score, a top-prestige Bolshoi co-production, and enough scenery to rebuild Canary Wharf.

If only Christopher Wheeldon’s new Covent Garden ballet Strapless were a scandal, like the portrait itself when originally unveiled in Paris in 1884, or like Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon at its première. If only it could be dubbed a tasteless exhibition of an undesirable type of female.

Instead, it’s just a polite little flop, vastly over-decorated, overcomplicated, and with a whiff of evasion about it. Rather than focusing on what Mme Osipova was surely hoping for — a big, meaty, tragic ballerina role about the society beauty who paid for her temerity in letting a shoulder strap slip for her portrait — we have something more like a passing plot strand in Downton Abbey, a costume parade with little dance interest. Even the latent homoeroticism is barely more than a hand on the waist here, a meaningful glance there — despite the full-on kiss between Sargent and his friend Belleroche, which might stir the Orthodox pigeons in the Bolshoi roof when the production is done there next year.

It’s strange how British ballet has fallen behind the contemporary dance sector when it comes to storytelling and emotion. Now, even if they have less money for ‘plots’, as such, it’s dance-makers such as Kim Brandstrup, Matthew Bourne, Arthur Pita, Jonathan Burrows, Crystal Pite, Akram Khan, Javier de Frutos and Mark Bruce who are unafraid of emotion, of the power of body language and music, choreographers who know how to wring the public’s heart.