Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could and should extend its reach beyond boy meets sylph and began wrestling with heavyweight essay subjects such as the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Mayerling) or the last of the Romanovs (Anastasia). And now look: Queen Victoria, the pointe shoe years, a bold, good-looking ballet that almost triumphs over the absurdity of its premise.
Cathy Marston’s latest work for Northern Ballet follows the success of her 2016 Jane Eyre, a spare, clever reworking of the novel that will be danced by American Ballet Theatre in New York this June. Victoria, which premièred in Leeds last weekend, has been commissioned to mark the Queen’s bicentenary and is told from the point of view of Beatrice, the beloved youngest child charged with editing and transcribing her mother’s diaries — an act of loving censorship described by one biographer as ‘one of the greatest acts of censorship in history’.
Flanked by Steffen Aarfing’s set of high, handsome bookshelves, the 43-year-old princess, vividly played and danced by Pippa Moore in her farewell season, begins work on her mother’s formidable output — the diaries alone filled 122 volumes and she averaged 2,500 words a day. As she reads, the characters come to life around her, but Victoria’s literary executrix is not merely a witness. Whenever the diaries run counter to the image of her mother as matriarch and stateswoman, the well-meaning Beatrice joins the dance in order to reshape and sanitise the scene before turning to rip the offending pages from the record.
The boldly episodic narrative outline runs to two rather confusing A4 pages — I defy anyone to convey ‘Albert dreams of a new Europe unified through his growing family’ without surtitles.
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