The Royal Ballet: Back on Stage, Covent Garden, review: an evening of elation and exasperation

“The Royal Ballet: Back on Stage” was exactly that: Britain’s greatest dance company returning after a miserable, Covid-compelled absence of seven months. Also acting as an experimental “pilot” for the newly distanced house and the forthcoming reduced season of opera and ballet, this live-streamed gala proved a strange evening – by turns exhilarating and exasperating, and bittersweet overall. And, just as ballets tend to be built around tussles – magical vs real, good vs evil, parents vs offspring – this often felt like an altogether new kind of fight: the fun police (in the form of the Government’s “guidelines”) versus ballet itself.

On arrival, your temperature is taken, your e-ticket’s QR code scanned, and your bag checked by a fellow behind a giant Perspex screen. Not exactly a world of escapism, but so far, so easy. On Friday, however, there were no cloakrooms, programmes, bars, restaurants, or even seats in the stalls – the latter have been completely removed to make way for the distanced, ever-excellent house orchestra. The specially invited audience – chiefly, thoughtfully, composed of nurses and their families, and students – numbered just 400 (less than one fifth of the house’s 2,256 capacity), with masks obligatory at all times front-of-house, and at the end you had to stay in your distanced seat until an usher allowed you to leave.

All a far cry, then, from the giddy, glossy, jostling, glasses-clinking conviviality of a traditional evening at Covent Garden, and I profoundly hope both that the management isn’t kidding itself just how pivotal to the house’s appeal this side of things is, and also – probably the thornier issue – that it is “allowed” to do something about it come November. But in the end, there was considerable solace to be had on Friday night. And this came from the most important part of the building: the stage.

This is not to say that the 200-minute (with one interval) programme of snippets and short works from the Royal Ballet’s repertory was ideally curated: of the five best new Royal Ballet pieces from the past 15 years – Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale, Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern, Cathy Marston’s The Cellist – there was no sign. And, impossible as it is to deny the likeability of Strictly alumna Anita Rani (a non-elitist draw for the online audience, I’m guessing), her compering, complete with understandable bids for donations but often awkward interviews with various company members, was pretty awful. “I mean wow, right?” was her reaction to the excerpt from McGregor’s Woolf Works, and not untypical.

But still, what a range the company demonstrated here – and oh, those dancers. These extraordinary creatures have, let’s not forget, spent most of 2020 having to train either at home using dining tables and banisters as a barre, or else grimly masked, in tight “bubbles”, in the studio. And yet, here they were, looking – after a forgivably tentative start – almost as if nothing had happened.

The overture from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty proved a surprisingly moving opening – heavens, how I’d missed the place – after which successive dancers slipped serenely into successive roles as if donning much-loved silken gloves. The unfettered romantic give-and-take of Mayara Magri and Matthew Ball in the “If I Loved You” pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s Carousel; Francesca Hayward’s Juliet (MacMillan, again) skipping around and craning rapturously back towards her Romeo as only she can; Marianela Nu?ez and Vadim Muntagirov’s high-classical masterclass in the pas de deux from Don Quixote – these were moments when the art form completely worked its magic.

There were other treats besides. The evening’s one novelty was a lovely, lovingly danced little duet of yearning and loss, In Our Wishes, by Marston. Marcelino Sambé and Anna-Rose O’Sullivan completely stole the show (and the audience’s hearts) with the sun-kissed virtuosity of the “cornfield” pas de deux from Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée. And there was something particularly stirring about the Technicolor, at-long-last-reunited exuberance of the full (-ish) company in MacMillan’s Scott Joplin fantasia Elite Syncopations – fronted by the ever-superb Yasmine Naghdi – that closed the show.

Inevitably unsatisfying as the gala format is, I left elated by much of what I’d seen, not least by the dancers’ evident, effervescent joy at being allowed to do the thing they live for – but also correspondingly furious that those distancing guidelines are so brutally robbing the company of crucial ticket sales. Walking to the Tube through crowds of people chucked out of pubs at exactly 10pm, and then catching a train packed cheek-by-jowl, did little to quell the sense of strychnine-bitter injustice.

Watch online until November 8 at Royal Opera House