Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

I never wanted it to end: Royal Ballet’s Triple Bill and Fonteyn celebration reviewed

Margot Fonteyn: A Celebration

Royal Opera House

The Firebird / A Month in the Country / Symphony in C

Royal Opera House

The trouble with taking my mother to the ballet is that on the way home she will always say: ‘Well, that was wonderful, darling.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘But of course I saw Nureyev and Fonteyn dance the parts and nothing will ever be the same.’ And so on the Central Line after the Royal Ballet’s Margot Fonteyn: A Celebration, I waited for the sorrowful ‘But…’ It never came. ‘That was wonderful,’ she said. And it was.

Dame Margot Fonteyn DBE, prima ballerina assoluta, the company’s patron saint en pointe, wasn’t a ghost at the feast, but a guiding light as Marianela Nunez, Natalia Osipova, Lauren Cuthbertson, Sarah Lamb, Francesca Hayward and Yasmine Naghdi danced twelve of her greatest roles from the Firebird to Juliet.

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