The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Feeling a bit Bolshoi
The 2013 acid attack on the company’s director was just the latest in centuries of scandals. Mark Monahan reports
the Rule of the Tsars to Today. Behind its Ellroy-esque title lies an exhaustively researched, elegantly written sweep through the history of the Bolshoi theatre and the ballet company that bears its name. (Although a professor of music at Princeton, for concision Morrison sticks generally – although not exclusively – to the balletic, as opposed to operatic, side of the operation.)
“From the start, the Bolshoi Theater was rife with political and financial intrigue”, Morrison begins, and this remains his central theme: that the players may have changed over the centuries but, in essence, ’twas ever thus. The first chapter paints an enjoyable portrait of Michael Maddox, the wheeler-dealer Englishman who, in 1780, indirectly acquired a licence “for the presentation of entertainments” from Catherine the Great, which he put to use first at the Znamenka playhouse (until it burnt to a crisp) and then at his new theatre on Petrovka Street (which followed suit).
As the story progresses, we see an increasingly grand – or “bolshoi” – sequence of theatres rise from the frog-ridden Moscow bog, only to burn down again. The current structure was not completed until 1856, which – entirely uncoincidentally – was the year of Alexander II’s coronation. The tsars would repeatedly use it for grandstanding galas. For them, dance was emblematic “of cultured enlightenement and of hierarchical, top-down government”.
Even after the revolution, little changed. The Communists soon grasped that, far from being an intolerable relic of imperialism, the Bolshoi could be made to serve the hammer and sickle, too. In fact, in the Twenties, ballet came to matter in Russia as never before.
Under Stalin, the Politburo cemented its control over artistic life. In a pithy section, Morrison outlines how Stalinism decreed that all practical concerns were subordinate to the ideals of socialist realism: “no compromises, no second-guessing, no vacillation”. Rather than give the censors anything to get upset about, the safest option for artists was to ensure that nothing offmessage even reached the stage.
Morrison’s sensitive exploration of the life of the great, headstrong ballerina Maya Plisetskaya becomes a prism through which to analyse the pressures that were heaped on dancers to toe the Soviet line. (Fearing she might be an unreliable ambassador, the ministers of culture ridiculously struck her from the Bolshoi’s first ever tour to London, in 1956.) The epilogue begins with the theatre’s re-opening in 2011 after its phenomenally expensive restoration, and concludes with an optimistic outlook for the Bolshoi and, rightly, for ballet as a whole.
As well as giving the historical context – including vivid depictions of the theatre at the heart of Moscow, when it was stricken first by Napoleon and later by the Wehrmacht – Morrison has