The Romanovs were a hot topic in 1967: it was the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, memories of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar winning Anastasia were still fresh and Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra was on every bestseller list. Kenneth MacMillan was ‘sick to death of fairy tales’ and his one act treatment of the Anna Anderson story, with its groundbreaking use of archive film and uncompromising Martinu score, was a ballet for grown ups that wrestled with the very nature of human identity. Lynn Seymour, the greatest dance actress of her generation, created the role of the mental patient who might (or might not) be a Grand Duchess and the production, made for Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, was an immediate critical and popular success.
Four years later, when MacMillan took over from Frederick Ashton as co director of the Royal Ballet, he needed to feed the public appetite for full evening narratives (plus ça change…) and decided to extend his expressionist psychodrama with a two act prequel showing the home life of Nicholas II and the early days of the Russian Revolution using music from Tchaikovsky’s First and Third symphonies.
It was a wildly ambitious experiment but the shift from Tchaikovsky to Martinu was enough to give you the bends and the new scenes looked desperately stodgy and literal when set beside the edgy, filmic final act.
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