Scarlet women

A Covent Garden barfly was scanning her programme during the first interval: ‘Oh yes, the one about the gynaecologist.’ She meant Strapless, of course, an attempt to tell the back story to John Singer Sargent’s ‘Portrait of Madame X’, which scandalised the Paris Salon of 1884.

‘Madame X’ was Amélie Gautreau, a Creole beauty who became the trophy wife of a Paris banker (and bat-guano importer). Impressed by Sargent’s striking portrait of her lover, the surgeon and saloniste Samuel-Jean Pozzi, Mme Gautreau agreed to let the fashionable young artist immortalise her own cadaverous allure. Bad idea. Her brazen pose and the fallen strap of her low-cut gown caused lasting damage to her reputation.

Strapless has been overpainted since last year’s première but remains resolutely uninvolving thanks to a thin plot and cardboard characters. Christopher Wheeldon tries to embody the contradictions of fin-de-siècle French society, a world at once sensuous and censorious, but takes refuge in cliché. The beau monde bustle about in black barathea (or possibly bombazine) like the cast of Renoir’s ‘Les Parapluies’ on a dry day. Meanwhile, Gay Paree dances the can-can (naturellement) in a scene eerily reminiscent of Kenneth MacMillan’s tarty parties. Keen, clean courtesans hop about, stockinged legs tucked behind their ears in a half-arsed port d’armes, but their moves have none of the sluttish, Dionysian abandon of the real thing.

Wheeldon struggles to create believable protagonists or a compelling narrative — despite having a dramaturg on the payroll. The underwritten secondary characters barely register but the big set-pieces fall just as flat. The crucial establishing pas de deux between the heroine and Dr Pozzi is a sexless sequence of lifts and locks with no sense of heat or urgency and is given little nourishment by Mark-Anthony Turnage’s shrill and bloodless score. The ballet’s epilogue — 21st-century tourists admiring ‘Madame X’ at the Met — still feels trite, but Natalia Osipova makes the most of her closing solo, backed by the masterpiece that guaranteed her immortality.