Review: ANASTASIA, Royal Opera House, 26 October 2016

If Kenneth MacMillan had left well alone, the taut little chamber piece he made in 1967 - stark, inventive and very affecting - would be hailed a modernist masterpiece by now. Instead, swayed by the demands of becoming director of the Royal Ballet in 1971, he lumbered Anastasia with two long preceding acts to fit the traditional full-evening format.

Granted, this gets the full company on stage and sends the costume department into overtime, and it lets the orchestra loose on two entire Tchaikovsky symphonies, which perks the players up no end. But the result is a three-act ballet that is not only unbalanced, but baggy. Under the pretext of giving more information - about the family of Tsar Nicholas II, the children's gilded lives unshadowed by knowledge of the starving unrest beyond the Winter Palace - it gives the audience an hour and a half to nod off.

In this revival even the presence of Natalia Osipova in the title role cannot fully animate Acts I and II, for all that she frolics so prettily alongside her sisters and ranks of adoring naval officers on the royal yacht - handsomely represented in Bob Crowley's new designs as a single sturdy funnel set against a glinting Baltic Sea. There are some lovely moments when the choreographer exploits the plaintive potency of Tchaikovsky's folk-tinged melodies, but most of the time the dramatic tension is as slack as a sail in the doldrums. On opening night even the ballroom pas de deux featuring Marianela Nunez as the Tsar's celebrated favourite ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska lacked sparkle - and this was a dancer famous for wearing all her jewels at once.

And yet the true story of Anastasia couldn't be more fascinating, if complicated. When MacMillan created his short ballet (now Act Three) about a woman in a Berlin mental asylum who believed she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, half the world (including the choreographer) believed, or hoped, that she really was. A DNA test in 1994, three years after MacMillan's death, proved decisively that she wasn't, and this local difficulty may explain why the ballet has not been revisited till now.

In fact Act III, a grim contrast to the lushness of the earlier acts, still works perfectly well as an emotive study of dementia and identity loss. Against an aural backdrop of electronic burblings and music by Martinu, "Anna Anderson", flanked by her nurses and psychiatrists, watches scraps of flickery home movies from the Romanov archive. Well-heeled visitors come to gawp at her. She suffers flashbacks, some benign, some terrifying, but all of them feasible reactions to the stories that are fed to her.

For an actress-dancer of the calibre of Osipova, Anna Anderson is a gift of a role, and it is hard to imagine a more reactive, more dynamic, under-the-skin interpreter. She is riveting to watch, whether sprinting dementedly around the perimeter of the stage, or wrestling with nightmare visions of her nemesis, the creepy Rasputin, or simply lying prone and shaking from head to foot. Osipova's body is a virtuoso instrument, and MacMillan's experimental expressionism (a style he rarely visited again) gives it thrillingly free rein.

There are scenes in Act III that some will find disturbing, but it's to the credit of the ballet, and this revival of it, that they exert such power. Perhaps one day Deborah MacMillan, the choreographer's widow who controls his estate, will dare to return Anastasia to its terse, one-act form.

Anastasia at Royal Opera House until 12 November. Broadcast live to cinemas on 2 November

Picture credit: Tristram Kenton