Mayerling (Viviana Durante-Irek Mukhamedov-Darcey Bussel, Royal Ballet 1994)

"Mayerling", choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan ("Romeo and Juliet") and performed by the Royal Ballet, tells the story of the tragic love affair between the mentally-ill Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary and his 17-year-old mistress Mary Vetsera, which ended in a murder-suicide at the royal lodge of Mayerling on January 30, 1889. Viewers be warned...this is no fairy-tale, but a dark, intense story of passion, violence, and death.

Irek Mukhamedov is almost frightening as Rudolf, a tormented, drug-addicted womanizer who brutally assaults his new bride (Jane Burn) on their wedding night and who seems to decay visibly as he sinks into madness and addiction. Drawn against his will into a web of radical political intrigue, Rudolf finds solace in Baroness Mary Vetsera, a highstrung teenager with a death-wish to match Rudolf's own. Viviana Durante dances Mary with an electrical intensity, fully believable as a young girl fascinated by death. Lesley Collier and Darcey Bussell also add spice as the scheming Countess Larisch and Rudolf's coquettish mistress Mitzi Kasper, and Matthew Hart is a loose-limbed Bratfisch. The choreography is classic MacMillan, filled with the same passionate, full-speed-ahead energy that characterizes his "Romeo and Juliet" --- the pas de deuxs are so violent sometimes you wonder how Mukhamedov, Durante, and Burn get through them without getting hurt. If you're looking for pretty, "classic" ballet, you're not going to find it here. Dancers flail and fall, grasping frantically at each other like drowning people reaching for the last available lifeboat, and even the scenery seems soaked in despair. I suppose you could call "Mayerling" the "anti-Romeo"; transcendant, glowing romance is replaced here by lust, desperation, and darkness. The ballet ends with one of the most shocking scenes I can remember; the rigor-mortised body of Mary Vetsera being dragged from a carriage and laid in a coffin for a secret burial in a barren, darkened cemetery.