A class act that reveals Queen Victoria’s forgotten lust for life
Ballet Victoria Northern Ballet, Sadler’s Wells ★★★★★
It has been said that the future is beyond our control, but the past, by contrast, is entirely what we make it. See Victoria, the latest, terrific creation by Northern Ballet, and you may well agree.
The work of choreographer Cathy Marston and dramaturge Uzma Hameed, it was inspired largely by The
Last Princess, Matthew Dennison’s 2007 biography of Beatrice, youngest daughter of the woman who until recently was our longest-serving monarch. It was Beatrice – long smothered by her mother and forced by her into a kind of shared, constant mourning when her own husband Liko died – who took it upon herself to edit Victoria’s copious diaries after her death. And the central hypothesis of this brisk new two-acter, this week getting its London premiere, is that Beatrice in fact excised a great deal, in the process helping form the severe image of the monarch that endured.
This, then, is a rare thing: a ballet by two women, about two women, in which Victoria’s story is told via the often distorting gaze of Beatrice as she pores through her mother’s memoirs. Glance at the synopsis, which describes a narrative ricocheting between Beatrice’s “present” and her family’s past, and you may take fright. But this fiddly-sounding structure works far better on stage than on page, with the friction between truth, fiction and eras constantly fascinating.
Always a class act, Marston here tells this complex story with great dexterity, her expressive, often Macmillan-esque steps edging towards the dance-theatrical end of the neoclassical spectrum and knitting well with Philip Feeney’s score.
Admittedly, royal historians alone may be able to distinguish between Victoria and Albert’s eight other children (plus spouses), but there’s no mistaking the main dramatis personae – Victorias and Beatrices young and old, Albert, Victoria’s ghillie John Brown, Liko – or the relationships between them.
The piece is never better than when Beatrice’s outrage – by turns moralistic, prudish and plain daughterly – causes her to rewrite history. After Victoria’s clinch with John Brown ( just feet from the long-dead Albert’s bust) turns passionate, she physically moves the couple apart from each other into the rigidly platonic poses that will henceforth always define their relationship.
Similarly, just when you’re thinking that the second act is proving less effective than the first because of Beatrice’s lesser involvement in the action, she surveys a vividly erotic pas de deux between her mother and father, and then coolly rips the relevant pages from her diary. Again, the highly sexual, hopelessly romantic side of her remarkably un-“victorian” mother is forever scrubbed out.
Steffen Aarfing’s steely, severe library of a set works surprisingly well given the period, as do his period costumes for the leads; less successful are the modern, conceptual, affectedlooking outfits for the corps. For the cast, only praise, with Abigail Prudames switching expertly between all-out generous passion and terrifying control as Victoria, and Pippa Moore, as the adult Beatrice, driving the entire narrative in a performance as dramatic as it is technically sharp.
Northern Ballet feels like a company on a roll at the moment, and this piece – ultimately as much about reconciling oneself to the past as rewriting it – will only bolster that. Definitely one for the diary.