Rehearsal photos: Kenneth MacMillan’s L’histoire de Manon at La Scala
Kenneth MacMillan‘s L’histoire de Manon opens at La Scala on 8 July for a short run of seven performances over ten days.
Apart from in the UK, the ballet Manon is known as L’histoire de Manon in Europe as Jules Massenet’s estate brought a case contesting that the title could lead to confusion with his opera ‘Manon’, which seems a bit much considering that all the music for MacMillan’s piece is by Massenet, meaning the estate takes royalties each time the ballet is performed.
L’histoire de Manon entered the repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1991 (where the legal dispute took place) and was first performed at La Scala in 1994. The current performances mark the 1974 ballet’s 50th anniversary, and the 30th anniversary of its debut in Milan.
Because of a spate of injuries, the resident principals of La Scala will be joined by The Royal Ballet‘s Reece Clarke in the role of Des Grieux with La Scala’s Nicoletta Manni; Paris Opera Ballet’s Myriam Ould-Braham will dance Manon with Claudio Coviello; and company principals Virna Toppi and Marco Agostino lead the third cast.
The performance with Manni and Clarke on 10 July will be televised by Rai Cultura and streamed live on medici.tv.
MacMillan remarked to an American writer soon before The Royal Ballet brought Manon to the States: “You have a sixteen-year-old heroine who is beautiful and absolutely amoral, and a hero who is corrupted by her and becomes a cheat, a liar, and a murderer. Not exactly our conventional ballet plot, is it?”
It certainly isn’t, and it somewhat divided critics after the premiere.
Myriam Ould-Braham and Claudio Coviello
Jann Parry in her excellent biography Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan quotes some of them. The most infamous of these is by Jane King in the Communist daily, the Morning Star: “It is an appalling waste of lovely Antoinette Sibley who, as Manon, is reduced to a nasty little diamond digger. You do not have to be a militant feminist to resent MacMillan’s repeated representation of the female sex as deceiver and destroyer of the male.”
The ‘nasty little diamond digger’ label stuck.
Mary Clarke for the Guardian had an equally juicy turn of phrase: “Basically, Manon is a slut and Des Grieux is a fool and they move in the most unsavoury company.” However she added, “MacMillan needs an editor… but for all his faults, he is one of the very few choreographers today who can write a big-spectacle ballet for an opera-house company that is developed entirely in the classical idiom and is done entirely through dancing.”
Another extract from Clarke’s review echoes an opinion I’ve always held: “By the end of the evening, you do get awfully tired of Massenet.” This, I feel, is because musical sections are repeated – especially for the pas de deux – to make them last longer, and the ear says, ‘no, this isn’t what Massenet would have done.’ You can hear the photocopier churning out another copy and it being pasted into the score.
Nicoletta Manni and Reece Clarke
In the Financial Times, Andrew Porter predicted that Manon would “certainly reward repeated observation and generations of interpreters”.
And so it came to pass…
If you would like to read more about Manon by Jann Parry (for gramilano) – with per formances by Natalia Osipova and Reece Clarke – please follow this link.
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
