Maddaddam – The Royal Ballet

Max Richter
Maddaddam
The Royal Ballet

Dancers:
Act I – Castaway
Snowman/Jimmy – Joseph Sissens
Oryx – Fumi Kaneko
Crake – William Bracewell
Toby – Melissa Hamilton
Zeb – Lukas Bjørneboe Brændsrød
Ren – Sae Maeda
Amanda – Leticia Dias
Blanco – Gary Avis
Blackbeard – Milan Yep
Painballer 1 – Téo Dubreuil
Painballer 2 – Aiden O’Brien
Prologue, Crakers, Pigoons – Artists of The Royal Ballet, Students of The Royal Ballet School

Act II – Extinctathon
Melissa Hamilton, Fumi Kaneko, Sae Maeda, Leticia Dias, Joseph Sissens, William Bracewell, Lukas Bjørneboe Brændsrød, Giacomo Rovero, Gary Avis, Marianna Tsembenhoi, Ashley Dean, Nadia Mullova-Barley, Chisato Katsura, Amelia Townsend, Liam Boswell, Harry Churches, Francisco Serrano, Harrison Lee,
Pigoons, Craker Prototype – Artists of The Royal Ballet, Students of The Royal Ballet School

Act III: Dawn
Descendant Blackbeard – Marco Masciari
Descendant Ren – Ashley Dean
Descendant Amanda – Marianna Tsembenhoi
Descendants, Descendant Children, Pigoons – Artists of The Royal Ballet, Students of The Royal Ballet School
Ancestor Snowman-the-Jimmy – Joseph Sissens
Ancestor Toby – Melissa Hamilton
Ancestor Zeb – Lukas Bjørneboe Brændsrød
Ancestor Amanda – Leticia Dias
Ancestor Adam – Giacomo Rovero
Ancestor Ren – Sae Maeda
Ancestor Crake – William Bracewell
Ancestor Oryx – Fumi Kaneko

Conductor – Koen Kessels
Orchestra of The Royal Opera House

Wayne McGregor – Direction and Choreography –

We Not I – Set designer
Gareth Pugh – Costume designer
Lucy Carter – Lighting designer
Ravi Deepres – Film designer  

In a narrative ballet performance, you know that things are not as they should be when you hear long voice-overs explaining what has happened and what will happen. What it means is that the stage action is not doing what it is supposed to, i.e. telling the story. It would be hard to find a more muddled, opaque or confusing dance work than Wayne McGregor’s ‘new’ full-length evening for The Royal Ballet, Maddaddam. ‘New’ because this is a co-production with National Ballet of Canada who drew the short straw in staging the world premiere in Toronto some two years ago. Alas, the ballet has now been allowed into this country by Border Force and has taken up residence at Covent Garden. It is an unholy mess, an evening of self-regarding indulgency visited upon audiences and, criminally, on the Royal Ballet dancers called upon to perform it.  

The choreographer has taken writer Margaret Atwood’s dense, post-apocalyptic trilogy of novels, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam to create a dance triptych, a structure he clearly favours and is under the impression he is good at, given that both the mixed Woolf Works (2015) and the overblown and tedious The Dante Project (2021) follow the same construction. The sense of déjà vu is strengthened by the fact that Maddaddam also mirrors the ‘moods’ of the latter’s three sections – Act I, conflict, Act II abstraction, Act III, resolution.

Maddaddam falls at the first fence by not arousing the audience’s interest in the characters they see and then making them care about their fates. What is happening on stage is so abstruse, so distanced and so impenetrable that one simply sits back to watch movement, unaware of who or what these people are and represent and not caring enough to want to know. The programme assures us that McGregor worked with a dramaturg on this evocation of Atwood’s vision but it is impossible to detect their input, so utterly baffling is the result of their labours. 

We are told somewhat portentously by the voice-overs that what we are seeing is important but that is not carried over to the choreography which is yet another rehash of the same palette used by the choreographer for over a quarter of a century now. Every McGregor trope is here, swoops and lunges, flicks and twitches, muscle-snapping extremes of whiplash movement and endless spinning. It is mind-numbing in its vacuity, no one gesture imbued with meaning, and on and on it all goes, McGregor being a choreographer who has an extraordinary ability to produce choreography by the mile, so that it stretches off over the horizon, and stops when it, well, stops.

For all its cutting-edge, master of innovation reputation, the McGregor experience is essentially an exercise in nostalgia. In dance terms, this means a constant revisiting of the choreographer’s own past, back to the moment when he found his ‘voice’; each new work a journey back in time. This is emphasised by the nostalgia of his artistic collaborators – the visual setting for McGregor’s dance works seem to hark back to his youth in the 1980s and Maddaddam is no different with costumes and a messy stage picture reminiscent of an early pop video; Act II evokes a 1980s arcade game, a balletic Pac Man. Even the video projections belie their 2022 genesis and seem vaguely historic. Gareth Pugh’s costumes are largely unflattering – why is Gary Avis wearing an outsize, shoulder-padded blue fake fur bolero jacket? Why is Joseph Sissens in a baggy black T shirt, wide skater boy shorts and a red baseball cap? Who knows. Who cares.

The Royal Ballet dancers called upon to deliver this dreadful piece work as hard as they can, but with McGregor, it feels like nothing is ever enough. Dwarfed by the settings, overwhelmed by the concept, they sweat their way through it all to no discernible effect, their finely-tuned, classically trained bodies put through a movement meat grinder which cannot do them any good.

Max Richter was commissioned for the score, but it is sad to report that this is not his finest moment and it seems to consist principally of a series of rising chords in drawn out crescendi which really say nothing.

That this work has been scheduled this season to follow Christopher Wheeldon’s children’s pantomime ballet Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and a seriously low wattage contemporary quadruple bill rings loud alarm bells about an artistic policy which has lost its way. The Royal Ballet is blessed with many fine dancers, but they simply cannot develop as artists if all they are given to perform is this. Maddaddam is a bad ballet (all choreographers make bad ballets during their careers) which could be forgiven in a season of dance gems, but they are few and far between. That one of the world’s premier classical ballet companies is not performing a single work from the classical canon in 2024/25 in order to favour McGregor, Wheeldon and Pite in their stead is as concerning as it is inexplicable.