Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake ***
The Australian Ballet, Coliseum, 14th July 2016
Leanne Stojmenov
© Jeff Busby
“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” Princess Diana’s wry words resonate in Graeme Murphy’s reworking of Swan Lake for The Australian Ballet, premiered in 2002 seven years after her interview with Martin Bashir, and five years after the Paris car crash in which she lost her life. This is no fairytale, but a radical rethink of Tchaikovsky’s ballet in which Odette discovers on her wedding day that her prince, Siegfried, is having an illicit affair with the Baroness von Rothbart. A classy production doesn’t always disguise holes in Murphy’s plot.
Read the full review on Bachtrack.