How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer Sargent’s magnetic, enigmatic portrait of Madame X, all alabaster skin, black dress and arrogantly sexy profile. A Mark-Anthony Turnage-commissioned score, a top-prestige Bolshoi co-production, and enough scenery to rebuild Canary Wharf.
If only Christopher Wheeldon’s new Covent Garden ballet Strapless were a scandal, like the portrait itself when originally unveiled in Paris in 1884, or like Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon at its première. If only it could be dubbed a tasteless exhibition of an undesirable type of female.
Instead, it’s just a polite little flop, vastly over-decorated, overcomplicated, and with a whiff of evasion about it. Rather than focusing on what Mme Osipova was surely hoping for — a big, meaty, tragic ballerina role about the society beauty who paid for her temerity in letting a shoulder strap slip for her portrait — we have something more like a passing plot strand in Downton Abbey, a costume parade with little dance interest.
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