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The Scandal at Mayerling Review
On an evening in the spring of 2022, I met with an old friend at the Theatre Royal. He had recently left behind his old habits, but even dressed for an evening at the ballet, his ill-fitting suit betrays his violent past, appearing more like a gangster than a bourgeois connoisseur of dance. And while he respected both the quality of the Scottish Ballet’s dancers and the intensity of Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography for The Scandal at Mayerling, he was more preoccupied by the matters of animation and agency.
‘This has become a habitual concern,’ I commented. ‘It is as if you are less interested in dancers as people than as mere objects, subject to the demands of gravity and submitting to the will of the choreographer. But can’t you see that a ballerina is not a puppet and, as we saw this evening, the dancer is capable of expressing more than just through gesture. The face of the prince as he lustily rages through society… the anguish in the eyes of his ill-fated mistress. Do these not challenge your desire to empty ballet of human passions?’
‘It is not emotional emptiness that I am considering,’ he replied, his eyes afire with the same passion that he previously evinced when throwing dustbins through the windows of errant bookmakers. ‘Rather, it is the capacity of the dancer to provide this emotion through the familiar gesture, and whether ballet is better understood through movement than the relative acting abilities of the dancer. I admit that Evan Loudan captured the wild-eyed fanaticism of the prince, but it is an accident of the auditorium that allows this to be visible to the audience. With broad gestures and its traditional movement vocabulary, ballet has never intended to communicate through the eyes and lips, but in the position of the arms, the torso, the legs. When Kleist celebrated the marionette as a superior dancer, is point was surely to reflect the aspirations of dance to embody emotion – and comment on the irony that a puppet could communicate these without feeling them.’
Alarmed by his sudden reference to an author who would, within a year of writing his most famous essay, commit suicide (rather like the protagonist of Mayerling), I sought further elaboration.
‘Do you mean to say that ballet is best understood as a form pf puppetry? That the pirouette spins as if manipulated from above, or a battement is an elevation in imitation of the marionette. The raised arms so familiar in MacMillan’s choreography imply invisible strings, and the pas de deux a facsimile of the puppet in concert with its puppeteer?’
He grinned with delight. ‘Exactly. Remember that early moment when Louden stumbled – perhaps unfairly since his confidence grew throughout the performance until he was the most perfect bastard – but he seemed unsteady in his approach and slipped. At that moment, a gasp came from some part of the auditorium and the illusion was broken. No longer a prince, he became a human, no longer a dancer. His character depends not on his performance but on his invisibility: he must be subsumed by the dance, not present.’
‘To think of the pas de deux with Constance Devernay,’ I interrupted, keen to remind my companion of more successful engagements, ‘it was rough and violent – deserving a trigger warning, so brutal were his sexual affections – but the female body was reduced to a mere object. She was flung around, bullied, manipulated. In this contrast, I can see the male dancer as the puppeteer and the female as the marionette.’
‘I’d pause carefully at this point.’ My companion laughed. ‘The sexual politics of the narrative might slip free from the strict discussion of puppetry. Indeed, it deserves its own commentary, but not one that this dialogue intends to do justice.’
‘But the pas de deux here, and elsewhere in Mayerling, is a clear expression of power relations. Despite the woman in the lift who called it all so elegant, MacMillan is conscious of his protagonist’s toxic masculinity, and he makes it explicit by brutalising the exquisite tradition of the sensual pas de deux, which is more frequently used to celebrate a union.’
‘You remain at the risk of losing the thread, but yes. MacMillan’s emphatic choreography which, to me, contains the influence of both the Bolshoi and the contemporary dance of the 1970s in its raw, visceral dynamism, is drawing attention to the nature of power: he sets the female as the victim, making the male the master. The women, after all, are very much at the mercy of the male in this story. And move up a level: the choreographer manipulates the dancers.’
I suspected my companion of making a turn to the theological: ballet appears, then, to work on a model in which an external force operates on the bodies, whether that be the choreographer –
‘Or the desires of the prince,’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘It is appropriate that what was once a true story becomes a ritualistic depiction of the violence of Aphrodite! Our Rudolph is driven to his death by a fierce sexual desperation that is not even constrained to a single object of desire.’
‘But isn’t this merely a function of the plot?’ I countered. ‘It is about how a man is destroyed by Aphrodite, or lust?’
‘Yet MacMillan exposes the marionette’s aesthetic at the heart of ballet to make that all the more explicit. This is a story about the failure of human agency: even the suicides are involuntary, the consequence of despair and, perhaps, some heavy drinking and drug abuse. This is not the heroic suicide of an existentialist. Mayerling is best told as ballet, because the medium has already acknowledged the truth that agency is an illusion and the human is at the mercy of an invisible – to itself – power.’
‘But where does all the emotion come from, the affect of the performance? Is it, then, the music? The walls of the auditorium?’
‘Of course not: it comes from the spectator watching the dancers and applying their feelings to what are merely suggestive, blank and neutral gestures. The ballet is merely animated bodies: the meaning is an event within the observer.’
Gareth Vile
