Will the real Swan Lake please stand up

It is the end of an era — the Royal Ballet’s extravagant Fabergé-egg Swan Lake production by Anthony Dowell is on its last legs. When this 28-year-old production finishes the current run on 9 April, that will be it for one of the most controversial classical productions of the past half-century. It’s the one set in Romanov Russia, festooned with ribbons and golden squiggles, with swans in champagne ball-gowns rather than pristine white feathers. Hallucinatory, glamorous and opulently symbolist? Or hectic, fussy and tatty? Adjectives divide between the adoring and the withering for Yolanda Sonnabend’s Gustave Moreau-esque designs and for Dowell’s hyperactive staging.

Last month marked 120 years exactly since the première of Swan Lake, as we know it, with the iconic sweepings of white swans created by Lev Ivanov, and the stomping vivacity of the court scenes by Marius Petipa, but everywhere you see a different production. English National Ballet’s is a quite distinct experience from the Royal Ballet’s; the Bolshoi’s is clammy, the Mariinsky’s is cool yet oddly cheerful. They have happy endings, sad endings, this music, or that music, this dancing, or that dancing. You hear Russians today swear that the west stole their ballet. You hear British fans retort that the Soviets murdered Swan Lake.

I understand the blinkered, possessive love: to me Swan Lake is the great enigma of ballet theatre; its music has Wagnerian emotion and spiritual power; the swans are extraordinarily potent metaphors; the theme of a man betraying himself is painful — it hits you personally. But I cannot really say that Swan Lake exists as a real text; it’s an act of private imagination.

It may amaze people who go to opera and theatre, but classical ballet has been lamentably cavalier with its own textual basis.