The Glums in tights

If you like the BBC’s Les Misérables, you’ll love English National Ballet’s Manon. Manon, in Kenneth MacMillan’s telling, is The Glums in tights. Alina Cojocaru dances Manon, an 18th-century courtesan in Paris, pimped by her brother Lescaut (Jeffrey Cirio). She falls for Des Grieux (Joseph Caley), young, handsome, penniless, love’s young dream, and is later ensnared by the older, richer, crueller Monsieur GM.

Cojocaru is sublime. ‘That’s her!’ whispered my neighbour in the stalls as Manon fluttered through the crowd at the inn. With Des Grieux, Cojocaru is sweet and expressive, tender and teasing. As Monsieur’s mistress, in diamonds and furs, she dances with quiet power and cold command. In the fateful final act, sent on a prison ship to New Orleans and lost in the Louisiana swamp, she is faint and unsteady, her body quivering and frail. What a rise, what a fall, what an actress.

As Des Grieux, Caley is dreamy, though a bit of a dupe. Shades of Hugh Grant in his Four Weddings heyday. But you cannot fault his dancing: strong, controlled, a still point in Manon’s storm. Cirio’s Lescaut is a star turn. His drunken routine in the brothel —hiccup! — is a rare moment of light relief. He swigs, he stumbles, he stifles a burp. He drags his mistress (Katja Khaniukova) across the floor. She is perfectly poised; he totally pissed. Khaniukova, all sway and sashay, completes a fine cast.

The scene where Manon is passed from man to man in a house of ill repute unsettles in its subtlety. Cojocaru dances with languid detachment, almost in a trance, as if she has had to put her mind elsewhere while her body is lifted and carried and pawed. It is a misstep, then, in the third benighted act, to have Manon forced to, as the tabloids put it, ‘perform a sex act’ on the port gaoler.