Anastasia

Kenneth MacMillan's Anastasia is one of the most ambitious and psychologically complex works in the ballet canon — a three-act exploration of identity, trauma, memory and the brutal convulsions of twentieth-century history, centred on the figure of Anna Anderson, who claimed for decades to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, the sole survivor of the Romanov massacre of 1918. MacMillan first created a one-act version in 1967 for Deutsche Oper Ballet, then expanded it to three acts for The Royal Ballet in 1971, with Lynn Seymour creating the role of Anastasia in both versions.

The first two acts, set in the glittering world of the Romanov court and its summer pleasures, use Tchaikovsky's First and Third Symphonies to evoke the doomed opulence of Imperial Russia — the tsar and tsarina, the glamour of balls and boat parties, the shadow of the approaching catastrophe never far away. MacMillan's choreography here is at its most lyrical and expansive, though already shadowed by premonitions of violence. The third act plunges into a completely different world — the chaotic, terrifying arena of revolution and civil war — and uses Bohuslav Martinů's harrowing Sixth Symphony and electronic tape to create a nightmare landscape in which the traumatised Anna relives her past in fragmented, hallucinatory images.

The role of Anastasia/Anna is one of the most demanding acting roles in all of ballet, requiring the dancer to portray both the young princess and the broken, obsessive woman who may or may not be her decades later. It is a role of extraordinary psychological intensity, and a testament to MacMillan's belief in ballet's capacity to engage with the darkest episodes of modern history.