Not Only Opera

Anna stripped back to her ballet essentials: Anna Karenina by the Mariinsky

Anna Karenina
Mariinsky Ballet
Royal Opera House
Balcony standing D30, £15 (first half); Lower Slips A90, £20 (second half)
4 August 2017
ROH page

A colleague struck fear into my soul with his one-line summation of Ratmansky's Anna Karenina: 'It reminded me of Strapless.' I went in readied for the worst – which was helpful, because even though on balance I'm happy to chalk up Anna Karenina as being not really my cup of tea, it is definitely and without question a whole lot better than Strapless.

Is it sensible to make a ballet of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina? This was the question I was pondering perhaps more than I should have been during the ballet, and came to the answer 'no and yes'. Ballet is, of course, in no way an art form where you can have the sort of discussions that Tolstoy raises in his novel. He also describes many more events than could be fitted into two hours of any performance art form. Ratmansky whips along at quite a pace and I wonder if it would all make sense to someone arriving cold.

But on the other hand, perhaps Ratmansky could reasonably expect when he made the ballet for the Mariinsky that most of his audience would at least know the story of Anna Karenina. And those touchstones with some of the big set pieces of the novel make for some of the ballet's most effective moments, choreographically and musically. The hippodrome scene rivals the novel's starkness in its portrayal of masculine competitive display, and of Anna's nightmare of public horror. Anna's clandestine meeting with Seryozha is upsetting, for all its melodrama. There is intense drama in the scene where Anna is cut, amazing given how little we know about the characters who aren't Anna or Vronsky.

It's not all good. The first few scenes do drift Strapless-wards, with a host of characters rapidly introduced with little meaningful action – I suppose Ratmansky felt he couldn't entirely cut Kitty and Levin, but I think maybe he should have. Karenin becomes more interesting right at the end but for much of the ballet his choreography borders on caricature, all hard angles and stompy walks (unpleasant flashbacks of Ed Watson's Singer Sargent). The bare sets occasionally feel clumsy – Karenin and his desk wheeled sorrowfully back and forth; a train carriage with many more degrees of freedom than it has any right to – and all manner of gauzy cloaks pin the designs firmly in silly ballet period fancy.

I also have to fight my prejudice against Rodin Shchedrin's music. I struggle with Shchedrin, finding his orchestration in particular bewildering. This is never music I would listen to on its own. But then, of course, it's not written to be listened to on its own (or hopefully it isn't), and even as a confirmed Shchedrin sceptic I had to admire the score's dramatic content. It's an ideal quickener in, for example, the scene of Anna's sickness, which might well have fallen flat with a less sympathetic accompaniment. The final musical motif, a startlingly realistic orchestral representation of a train's 'duh-dum duh-dum', is suitably, surprisingly chilling.

Ultimately, of course, what sets Anna Karenina apart from Strapless is that it has a much better story: Tolstoy's Anna remains complex, compelling, heroic and deeply sympathetic even when pared right back to her ballet essentials. All credit, of course, to Ratmansky for retaining this core, by no means a fait accompli.

'And what of the dancers?' I hear you cry. Well. What can I say? It is a relief finally to see Xander Parish in the flesh, and confirm that not only are his legs very beautiful but that he can land more softly than any dancer I've heard. Viktoria Tereshkina similarly inhabits with ease the persona that precedes her: smooth, beautiful, faultless, and of course instrumental in the success of Ratmansky's Anna. I can't say that the rest of the cast made much impression, but then this isn't really the ballet for such things.