Swan Lake Review: BRB’s Dark Magic Returns to Sadler’s Wells

Darker and moodier than an emo teen’s bedroom, Peter Wright’s Swan Lake opens not with a birthday party but with a coffin. Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production, which Wright made with the ballerina Galina Samsova in 1981, back when the company still answered to Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, has returned to its old Islington address. It is at least the third London visit since the move to Birmingham, and the production has lost none of its taste for black crêpe so writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk.

The curtain rises on a crowned casket and a court in full mourning. The old King is dead and his son Siegfried (Yasiel Hodelín Bello) is next in line. Best friend Benno (Riku Ito) prescribes the usual cure: drink, company and a pair of courtesans. Then the Queen Mother (Daria Stanciulescu) sweeps in to remind her son that a throne needs a queen and that he must pick one at tomorrow’s ball, and the prince sinks further into the gloom. Benno suggests a swan hunt. At the lake Siegfried meets Odette, a woman cursed by the sorcerer von Rothbart (a wicked Jonathan Payn) to wear white feathers by day and her own skin for only a few hours after dark.

Some heirlooms stay in the family because they are worth something. This one stays because it still breaks hearts.

Swan Lake has always been a tug of war between obligation to tradition and the urge to strike out, whatever the price. Wright walks that tightrope by turning the classic into a death sandwich: funeral, doomed love, double suicide. Bolting a state funeral onto the front of the 1895 Petipa–Ivanov revival (the template for most stagings since) while keeping its drowning finale means the bleakest of the great classics somehow gets bleaker still. Bravo.

The execution has its occasional faults, a handful of them noticeable and none of them fatal, but nobody on stage can be accused of coasting. Hodelín, born in Havana like the company’s director Carlos Acosta, was recently promoted to First Soloist, and the faith looks well placed. He is expressive even when parked at the edge of the action watching others dance; in the air he is all dangerous athleticism, yet he never lets you forget this is a prince who would rather be anywhere else. Yu Kurihara’s Odette/Odile is a deft double act. Her swan pairs technique of real authority with a vulnerability that never tips into simpering. Her Odile switches to calculated appetite for the Act III pas de deux, where the manipulation is as exact as the footwork and lust is very much on the menu.

Swan Lake has always been a tug-of-war between obligation to tradition and the urge to strike out, whatever the price

Philip Prowse frames all this with Gothic opulence. The costumes are detailed to the point of obsession (one cloak reportedly tips the scales at six stone, which explains why nobody twirls in it), and the scenery establishes place without shouting over the steps. The Act III ballroom glows in golds and blood reds. The lakeside is a classic bank of mist, generously topped up with dry ice, and together they make it easy to forget you are sat in Islington. Prowse keeps faith with tradition elsewhere too. Rothbart’s helmet and plumage leave no room for moral ambiguity: here is a villain who looks the part from crown to corns.

Forty-five years on, with its creator on the cusp of his centenary, the production still ends with two lovers in the lake and a best friend left holding the body. Some heirlooms stay in the family because they are worth something. This one stays because it still breaks hearts.