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Commentary

Kenneth MacMillan—For Better or Worse?
by Jane Simpson
© 2003

When Kenneth MacMillan died—October 1992, backstage, in the middle of a performance of Mayerling—he left the Royal Ballet with two apparently intractable problems. The first was the inheritance of a corpus of works of which a small number are performed so often that they have had a stultifying effect on the artistic development of the company, as well as causing his own early ballets to be neglected. The second problem is that with MacMillan’s loss the Royal Ballet, for the first time in its history, has been without a major choreographer of its own. The company is left apparently still frozen by the shock of his death, with no sign of a new choreographic talent on the horizon and a growing reputation as one of the least creative companies in Europe.

MacMillan’s early works were immensely promising, and far more diverse than you would know from his later output or from what we see on stage today. He joined the Royal Ballet in 1946, after famously forging a note from his father to get into the school, and had a considerable amount of success as a dancer, first as one of the original members of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet (where among other things he appeared as Sherlock Holmes), and later in the main company, where he was seen as an up-and-coming classical soloist as well as a talented character dancer. Photo-graphs of the time show him often looking rather lankily self-conscious, and it was acute stage fright, together with a growing involvement in choreography, that put an end to his dancing career in the early 1950s.

In hindsight, some of the patterns of the future were clearly to be seen from his earliest choreography. His second work, Laiderette, introduced the odd-one-out character that became one of his trademarks, and his first major success, The Burrow, investigated the psychological tensions of a group of people in a closed situation—another recurring theme. There were also plotless ballets, though, showing a real talent for the invention of neoclassical movement—Danses Concertantes, to Stravinsky’s music, was an early example—and even some humor: Solitaire was brilliantly funny when danced by the young Lynn Seymour, though with lesser casts it could seem no more than whimsical. Neither pure dance nor comedy feature greatly in his later works, and looking back on these it is sad that he lost either the interest or the ability to produce them.

The turning point of MacMillan’s career with the Royal Ballet was his Romeo and Juliet in 1965. Frederick Ashton was the director of the company at the time, and it’s hard to think of another major choreographer who would have handed this opportunity to a younger colleague—and competitor—instead of remounting the very successful version he’d made himself for the Royal Danish Ballet nine years earlier. “As director, I simply had to do it,” he said. This was a pivotal moment for the company: its whole subsequent history might have changed if he’d made a different decision. His own version, even with the changes and expansion he thought would be necessary, might have taught us that a full-evening ballet can make its point—dramatically and poetically—without heavy sets, a huge cast, and a literal trundling through the plot. As it was, MacMillan’s Romeo followed the style of the Lavrovsky and Cranko versions, and the precedent for the succeeding blockbusters was set. The ballet finally established MacMillan’s name outside ballet circles: ironically, because it was seen by the popular press as primarily a vehicle for the Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership, although MacMillan had created it on Seymour and Christopher Gable and was coerced into giving the first night to the more famous stars. This affair played a strong part in MacMillan’s decision to break with the Royal Ballet when he was offered the directorship of the company in Berlin, and the whole affair has become famous as one of the Royal Ballet’s major scandals, though it’s hard to see why it still arouses so much passion thirty years later.

His three years in Berlin and, overlapping this, his cordial relationship with Cranko and the Stuttgart company, produced many of his best works, including Song of the Earth, Las Hermanas, My Brother, My Sisters, Requiem and the one act Anastasia. Indeed it could be said that MacMillan did most of his best work away from the Royal Opera House. His early works for the smaller, non-Covent Garden, Royal Ballet—House of Birds and The Invitation as well as Danses Concertantes and Solitaire—all remained staples of the repertoire for years, whilst his version of Agon for the London company (before the Balanchine version had been seen over here) wasn’t a success, and others such as Diversions seem to be lost to the repertory. However, although his two early pieces for ABT might be worth seeing again, his later ABT period seems not to have produced much of lasting interest.

Over the years it became more and more apparent that MacMillan’s chief interest lay in close choreographic encounters between two or three dancers at most. Only a fanatical MacMillan admirer would maintain that his choreography for the corps de ballet compares with the pas de deux that form the heart of almost all his work, and in many of his ballets for the Royal Ballet one gets the feeling that the ensemble pieces are only there because the corps de ballet must be given something to do. (The Four Seasons was perhaps the most blatant example of this, but others run it close.)

Almost every one of his later ballets, and certainly all of his full-evening pieces, would be dramatically improved by a cut of two thirds in both length and numbers. The three-act Anastasia comes conveniently prepackaged, ready for a return to its far more effective one-act version; scene after scene of Mayerling goes by without adding anything to the development of either plot or character; and the hugely overrated Manon is a powerful fifty-minute piece drowned in what seems like hours of tedious tosh. (The Royal Ballet has made a start this season, I’m told, cutting the soldiers’ dance at the beginning of Act 3 of Manon. Now if they’d just get rid of the rag-bag-chic beggars in Act 1, and then all those tittupping whores in the brothel scene, they could cut it down to two acts and we’d be well on the way.) Even before the blockbusters the rule held good: Concerto, for instance, is a perfect example: a fine pas de deux surrounded by two movements where the corps de ballet work is of almost embarrassing naivete. (And incidentally, it has been fascinating to hear the reaction of relatively new balletgoers to this summer’s revival of Concerto; many are bewildered by it, seeing it as quite different from the MacMillan they thought they knew.)

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the ‘Opera House Effect’—large theatres, large numbers of dancers needing occupation, and the growing popularity of long ballets—by forcing MacMillan to compromise, and to add the huge amounts of padding which seriously dilute the central drama of some of his major works, had a seriously negative effect on his development. Both he and, in the long run, the Royal Ballet would have been better off artistically if he’d been able to follow the example of so many contemporary choreographers and set up The Kenneth MacMillan Dance Company, where he could have given full reign to his taste for psychodramas, and surrounded himself with a small group of dancers sympathetic to his ideas and capable of bringing them to life. It is not coincidence that the best of his later ballets would fit perfectly into this scenario: My Brother, My Sisters, for instance, has a cast of seven and achieves its aim far better than a large scale work like The Prince of the Pagodas, while Winter Dreams, on the other hand, is full of extraneous numbers like the desperately unfunny piece for the Doctor and a chair, and would be a far better piece cut down to a smaller scale.

MacMillan’s talent was obviously very different from the music-driven genius of Balanchine, Ashton or Paul Taylor. There is hardly a moment, especially in his later works, when the combination of steps and music in itself carries his inspiration. Instead, he provided a basis which demands powerful personalities and acting skills to bring his roles to life. The obvious danger of this is that it teaches the dancers that choreography is to be interpreted rather than trusted—the exact opposite of the Balanchinean “Just Do”—which is all right until they start carrying this over into other people’s ballets. The results can be seen, for instance, in the intrusion of MacMillan-style acting into Ashton. The Royal Ballet’s current white hope, Sarah Wildor, was a lovely Chloe till she danced the girl who gets raped in The Invitation. When she returned to Chloe she brought with her a quite inappropriately realistic acting style. It has also become apparent that some of the dancers have come to despise the roles they have to dance in the classics, judging them by MacMillan standards rather than seeing them as part of a completely different world.

Some dancers, of course, have found fame and a raison d’être in the MacMillan repertory. Most famously, he wrote for Lynn Seymour, using her amazing talent as a dance actress as the inspiration for central roles from The Invitation onwards. Marcia Haydee had leading roles in his Stuttgart works, and in later years he chose Darcey Bussell for the principal role in The Prince of the Pagodas when she was still a very young dancer in the corps de ballet. His last inspiration, and probably the most significant after Seymour, was Irek Mukhamedov, whose humanizing influence was largely responsible for the success of Winter Dreams. The downside of this is that it left the dancers who didn’t interest him, or whose talent lay elsewhere, out in the cold. One of the most frustrating aspects of Royal Ballet-watching over the last thirty years has been the exclusion from the big acting roles of so many dancers judged “unsuitable.” We all have our own lists of might-have-beens, starting in my own case with Bryony Brind’s Juliet. (Tall women weren’t allowed to do Juliet until Darcey Bussell came along.)

Since MacMillan died the Royal Ballet has been, for the first time, without a choreographer of world standing. The company had become dependent on him for its continuing creative vitality and is still suffering from withdrawal symptoms, not helped by the close relationship that existed between MacMillan and his dancers, many of whom are senior members of today’s organization. David Bintley was “choreographer in residence” for a while but left through lack of opportunities even before he was offered the job of Director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Anthony Dowell has tried to develop talent from within the company, most persistently with Ashley Page, but although Page has by now been choreographing for twelve years and has produced a dozen works for the company, only one has ever survived into another season: not exactly a vote of confidence. Experiments with Forsythe have been of mixed success, and he withdrew from his last engagement and presumably won’t be back. Twyla Tharp disappointed the Royal Ballet’s audience and well wishers by making them a work which dwelt on what she saw as their pleasing decorum (whilst we were thinking that some Tharpish indecorum would make a nice change); and there was a rather gruesome duo of Tetley pieces. Otherwise, nothing. The effect on the dancers, particularly the seniors, has been seen in a loss of morale and enthusiasm, and even the faithful regular audience is starting to get a bit restive.

What will happen to the MacMillan ballets in the future? There is as yet no sign of the drop in favor which often follows an artist’s death, but in this case one wouldn’t expect it; the Royal Ballet is still run by people who were closely associated with MacMillan, and his name is revered in the company far above Ashton’s, already a remote historical figure to most of the dancers. MacMillan’s widow, who owns the rights to all his ballets, is also a powerful figure in the organization, although she has no official role since she was invited to join the Arts Council last year (a post, incidentally, from which she has already resigned). The test will come with the next generation, who will have no personal memories of MacMillan and will not have been involved in the creation of anything he did. They will see the range of his works with new eyes, and will be able to judge them afresh, and they will be able to consider and discuss the construction and choreography of his ballets without getting tangled in arguments about the subject matter. It will be no surprise to me if they find his early ballets—say, up to and including the one act Anastasia—far more worthy of revival and preservation than those we see so much of today.