Superb stand-in ignites explosive first night
Ballet Mayerling Royal Ballet, Covent Garden
The stakes and pressure could hardly have been higher for Ryoichi Hirano on Monday. This was the first night of the Royal Ballet’s 2018-2019 season (in the newly refurbished Royal Opera House), the ballet was Kenneth Macmillan’s pitch-black masterpiece, Mayerling – in its 40th-anniversary run – and the 35-year-old (a principal only since 2016) was dancing the role of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-hungary, the richest and most demanding ballet role ever created for a man. He was also doing so opposite one of the biggest stars in the ballet firmament, Natalia Osipova; was standing in – at just a few days’ notice – for an injured Ed Watson; and, to cap it all, was making his debut in the role.
The nerves showed at the start with a series of stiff opening enchaînements in the ballroom scene that spoke less of a solitary heir to the throne tortured by maternal coldness, political intrigue and the prospect of a loveless marriage than of a dancer desperate not to slip up. And besides, the lofty Hirano cut (as ever) an instantly but perhaps inappropriately dashing figure – would he really be able to convince over the story’s three hours as a libidinous, syphilitic morphine addict in moral and emotional freefall?
But Hirano got better, ultimately delivering a Rudolf as pitiable as he is repugnant. Together with a totally trusting, if decidedly miscast, Francesca Hayward (too bewitchingly strong and sensuous a dancer for the hapless suburban ingénue that is Rudolf ’s new bride), he made a great deal of Macmillan’s craftsmanlike barrage of brutal, treacherous lifts in the final scene of Act I, the wedding night. Increasingly hard to watch as this episode is, his character, and the story, suddenly ignited.
In Act III, it positively detonated. After a penultimate scene made particularly touching by Hirano’s by now black-hole despair and by Alexander Campbell as Bratfisch – so good-naturedly boisterous in his attempts to cheer his master up; so convincingly crushed by his failure to do so – came the climax, in which Rudolf and his new mistress, Mary Vetsera (Osipova), make a suicide pact, make love, and then kill themselves (very much as the real couple did at the Mayerling hunting lodge outside Vienna, in 1889).
Osipova has played Vetsera before, and is improving all the time. True, she still feels too brazen, too soon, as this 17-year-old baroness. But the explosive, barely contained energy of the Russian’s dancing does make her perfect as a sexual powder-keg that’s about to blow. And, in that final scene, she and Hirano are very potent together, as much for the unrestrained physicality of their performance as for the fleeting, beautifully judged, borderline satanic “Let’s do this…!” glances with which they nudge each other ever closer to the abyss.
I had one or two other reservations: that super dancer Kristen Mcnally needed rather sharper splinter of ice in her heart as Rudolf ’s grimly distant mother, Elizabeth, and the ever marvellous Marianela Nuñez was wasted as Rudolf ’s regular mistress Mitzi Caspar (wouldn’t you like to see her and Hayward as Vetsera?). But Sarah Lamb found the right combination of calculation and compassion as Rudolf ’s former lover Marie Larisch, and Gary Avis provided expert light relief as Elizabeth’s squeeze, Col Middleton.
Meanwhile, four Hungarian officers were crowned by first soloist Cesar Corrales, and the corps have seldom been better. Identically on form were the Royal Ballet Sinfonia under Koen Kessels, with Nicholas Georgiadis’s opulent costumes and grandly oppressive sets also fundamental, as ever, to the work’s power. As for Hirano, he returns to Rudolf twice more this run – and something tells me he will only get better.
Hirano, at just a few days’ notice, delivered a Rudolf as pitiable as he is repugnant