If a football manager produces a string of losses, the writing is on the wall and out he goes. He’s accountable — to shareholders, to the fans. The director of the Royal Ballet is not a football manager.
Nor is it easy to see to whom he would account for his plans and outcomes. The Royal Ballet governors are not like MotD panels unleashing Gary Nevilles and Alan Shearers on the play, or select committees foaming with Tom Watsons and John Whittingdales demanding explanations for the cultural strategy. They are a group of veteran ballet chums, and it appears to be inconceivable that it is their business to turn round and see if the latest Royal Ballet production scored or not. Let alone to sack the manager.
But really something has to be said after this frightful season, and given the ROH’s fondness for digital communication with the masses it would be a jolly good thing to have a live-streamed governors session where Kevin O’Hare is asked to explain why the Royal Ballet has so copiously lost the plot.
Lost the plot, literally. For the company that brought British ballet a worldwide reputation for dramatic storytelling seems mystifyingly incapable these days of producing a ballet of competent emotional narrative. This season has reached a nadir: Carlos Acosta’s Carmen last autumn, Christopher Wheeldon’s Strapless in the spring, and now Liam Scarlett’s Frankenstein; all of them luxuriously mounted and extensively botched.
Successful dramatic ballets always have a scene or two where you feel the choreographer’s heart quickening with excitement: the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, the trio in Manon, the Shades in La Bayadère. But nowhere in Scarlett’s flat Mary Shelley transliteration is there a dramatic sweet spot. The Creature vanishes disappointingly quickly after surgery before we can get a good look at him and he dances no more or less gracefully than anyone else (though Nehemiah Kish, being less gifted a mover than Steven McRae, inhabits it with more pathos).
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