MaddAdam at the Royal Ballet review: Margaret Atwood's nightmarish dystopia is richly beautiful

Margaret Atwood has an oculus for dystopia, and her MaddAdam trilogy of novels doesn’t stint connected atrocious news. Humanity has trashed the satellite and is each but wiped retired successful turn. It’s a bully ground for nightmares, nary question – but for ballet?

Wayne McGregor antecedently drew magic from Virginia Woolf and Dante, truthful isn’t daunted. The effect is arsenic vauntingly ambitious and helplessly flawed arsenic the humanity it portrays.

Rethinking astir 1,500 pages arsenic 100 minutes of dance, the ballet (which premiered successful Toronto successful 2022) doesn’t hint the novels’ beats – but the scraps of communicative McGregor gives aren’t helpful. The much the accumulation explains (childlike voiceover, projected names and dates), the much it baffles. When it responds abstractly to Atwood’s ideas, it soars into thing richly beautiful.

It opens successful a boggle of characters. We conscionable the idiosyncratic Crake (William Bracewell connected opening night), who engineers some a catastrophe and an improved contention of hominids, positive his person Oryx (Fumi Kaneko) and person Jimmy (Joseph Sissens); and besides the pacifist Toby (Melissa Hamilton) and her tangled relationships.

McGregor, ever a fascinating movement-maker, creates a luxuriantly progressive trio for Jimmy, Oryx and Crake. They agelong wide, arsenic if they person each the clip successful the world, to Max Richter’s layered, lulling melody, which recurs enticingly done the evening.

The 2nd act, a defiantly engaged collage and “interactive biofreak” video game, plays retired beneath a stalactite metropolis hanging toothily from the ceiling (striking designs by architects We Not I). Dancers successful spotless achromatic are blank canvases successful this swiftly degraded utopia. Bracewell’s terrific solos seizure Crake’s delusive certainty successful hyper-rational consecutive lines, turns crisp arsenic a cleaver. As his planned catastrophe takes effect, Bracewell swooshes exultantly astir the stage, grandiloquent hands reaching for the skies.

McGregor’s erstwhile full-length ballets each staged a reckoning. Virginia Woolf took banal of her life; Dante’s sinners and believers met judgement successful the hereafter. Here, humanity indispensable look our failed custody of the planet.

The last enactment leaps past Atwood’s communicative and into a aboriginal wherever engineered humans unrecorded peaceably alongside lumbering hybrid creatures, gathering lukewarm rituals and root stories. Dancers successful kingfisher bluish aquatics done the aerial and skim implicit the floor, released into harmony. We spot versions of characters from erstwhile acts, their knotty moves present joyously unfurled. They tin astatine past creation their champion intentions, persist arsenic memories of their champion selves.

From the beginning, we’ve seen Jimmy tormented by the past but inactive drafting connected empathy – a superb Sissens spins from haunted, jerky solos into slinky hedonism, yet bringing grace to our breached world. The gorgeous closing dances surely determination beyond Atwood’s dire warnings.

But, she has besides noted, humanity is “doomed to hope” – and the ballet leaves america clinging connected to creation and music.

Royal Ballet and Opera, until November 30: bargain tickets here.