‘Manon’: A Thrilling, Tragic, Hypnotic Ballet
A review of ‘Manon’, at the Royal Opera House, 2024.
Manon Lascaut is a story about the ruinous nature of desire. It is also a story that features women who are bought and sold for sex. It is about lust, greed, gluttony, envy, pride — in fact, almost all of the seven deadly sins are on display. So it is, in other words, a deeply moral story in which the characters are overwhelmed by temptation and everything goes downhill. Like Dante’s Commedia, this sort of thing, charged as it is with powerful feelings and moral forces, is very well suited for the ballet. The adaptation, simply called Manon, was showing at the Royal Opera House earlier this year.
To the story, then. In the Abbé Prévost’s original novel, the young, idealistic des Grieux falls head over heels for the beautiful Manon when they meet by chance. Scorning the wishes of his family, he abandons his religious studies and runs away with her. But Manon is a bad influence. She loves money and seeks to pursue a life of luxury at any cost. Problems naturally ensue. And to maintain their lifestyle, des Grieux must abandon his goodness. He resorts to gambling and manipulation. But Manon nevertheless betrays him frequently for wealthier suitors. Des Grieux’s mistake is that he remains devoted, which — well, you can guess the rest.
Manon is a bad influence. She loves money and seeks to pursue a life of luxury at any cost.
But take a peep at all this through a feminist lens and it isn’t so clear that Manon is the corrupting force of the piece. If she disappoints Des Grieux (and us), it is because he imagines her as something other than she is. The ‘male gaze’, as they say, transforms her into a fiction. I am reminded of Pablo d’Ors: ‘When we fall in love, we overburden the other with our expectations. And so great are these that … finally practically nothing remains of our beloved. No one can fulfil such monstrous expectations.’ Moreover, Manon’s life is, in the end, shaped and defined by the men around her; and her pursuit of wealth could therefore be read as a desperate bid to assert some agency in this 18th-century world of men. It is not as if women at that time had much financial independence, is it?
But this is the ballet, not the book; and in Manon the ballet, first choreographed by Sir Kenneth Macmillan, we are invited to make of Manon (Francesca Hayward) what we will. The same events, more or less, are related to us in condensed form, but few authorial judgements are made. The choreography stresses Manon’s inner complexity: her capacity for vulnerability and affection but, equally, her growing cynicism and obsession with nice things. She is seen as the many-sided woman she is: innocent, manipulative, passionate, tragic; and cursed, as well as blessed, with an artless beauty. The omission in the title of the surname Lascaut, a symbol of patriarchal power, an Manon’s bondage to it, is telling.
The choreography stresses Manon’s inner complexity: her capacity for vulnerability and affection but also her growing cynicism and obsession with nice things
As for the way all of this is rendered on stage, there is enormous physical intensity, breathtaking duets and a big set-piece dances. Manon and the doomed Des Grieux have brilliant chemistry, taking us on a giddy and slightly rocky emotional ride that passes through love and lust and betrayal and reunion and finally calamity. And then Gary Avis, who plays the slightly creepy Monsieur GM, does a fantastically good job at showing how even the nastiest, most powerful, most overconfident men can become pathetic: putty in the hands of a beautiful woman. Macmillan’s ballet is known for how technically and physically demanding it is, having as it does some of the most emotionally intense pas de deux you are likely to see. To these eyes, such feats were carried out beautifully and certainly without any visible trace of difficulty.
Ballet taps into something universal: a language of the body that seems to resonates across cultures and generations. The precision of the form and the grace of its execution combine to create a perception of perfection which by its nature stands outside the ebb and flow of trends. But the sheer expressiveness and intensity of the form combine to communicate emotion with a strength and visceral quality that few other art forms can. Manon is moving, thrilling, deep, impassioned—a retelling of its inspiration that puts the emotion and richness of the individual over the morals of the community. It pulls us this way and that, driving forward, on and on, to its tragic climax.
