August – September 1988 Mary and Rudolf
MARY AND RUDOLF
‘I don’t know what your man’s thinking, not doing sessions in the weights room,’ Stephen told me back in July, during rehearsals for our pas de deux in MacMillan’s contrastingly upbeat one-act Elite Syncopations.
He’d been referring to Sander as “my man” for a while, because Nick so rarely cast us with other partners, and presumably because he’d also heard the rumours about us.
‘He’ll dislocate his shoulder if he doesn’t build enough strength for Rudolf’s lifts. ’
‘He’s never gone into a role unprepared. But it’s nice that you’re so concerned for him.’
‘I’m concerned for all the Rudolfs, Twiglet. Seven pas de deux. In bloody Russian winter military jackets. It doesn’t get harder than this.’
I hated it when he used his old nickname for me, but I let it slide, because he was right.
Crown Prince Rudolf, a real prince of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire who disgraced himself by committing murder-suicide with his teenaged mistress Mary Vetsera in the family hunting lodge, who MacMillan preserved in ballet amber in 1978, is the male dancer’s ultimate test. He’s in almost every scene, which demands stamina; he dances with six different women, which demands strength and versatility; and his character grapples with heroin addiction, lust, political conspiracies, and an obsession with death, which demands bucketloads of dramatic expression and mental fortitude.
Even as I defended Sander, I secretly worried that his run of absurdly good luck might end here.
The BCBC had only done Mayerling once before, and every single male principal who danced Rudolf had been left injured: torn rotator cuffs, ruptured ACLs, trapped nerves, even a fractured spine when one of the lifts went horribly wrong.
Fabrizio had transferred out to Teatro alla Scala at the end of the last season, leaving just four male principals able and willing to take on the anti-fairy-tale prince: Stephen, Tomas, Luka, and Sander.
There was another source of tension as the company prepared to start up again, with a new intake of first-year artists and a few select boosts up the career ladder: Jamie was now a proud first soloist; Fiona was not.
They had been two halves of the same pas de deux in Elite Syncopations, and yet only he got the glory of a keenly anticipated promotion.
She smiled brightly and clapped for him as hard as anyone else, but after that, her eyes glazed over and stayed that way into the autumn.
‘I’ve hit my ceiling, haven’t I?’ she said when I treated her to an unofficial commiseration dinner at Rules, a few streets away from the Dance Hall. ‘I’ll be thirty next year – there’s no becoming a principal after that. There just isn’t.’
It made my heart heavy. When the two of us had graduated into the BCBC together, I’d blithely taken it for granted that we’d ascend through the ranks together too, that the brilliance I saw in my friend would be just as obvious to the higher-ups.
It was tough to realise how much of my life I had built on assumptions.
* * *
Nowhere was the mood stranger than in rehearsals.
As Rudolf and Mary, Sander and I had to go to some disturbing and depraved places, intertwining ourselves in new, uncomfortable positions.
None of the sex scenes (or in soloist Saoirse’s case, as Rudolf’s new wife Princess Stephanie, rape scenes) were explicit by Hollywood standards.
It was still a neoclassical ballet: everything was symbolic, suggested, simulated.
Doing Anastasia the previous season had prepared me for some of the wickedly fast lifts and catches.
But I didn’t appreciate how unprepared I was for the intimacy of my scenes with Sander until we were in the middle of them, with Salvatore either watching silently from the side like a hawk, or barking instructions at us.
Between his old flame Marie Larisch, favourite sex worker Mitzi Caspar, and, of course, his new mistress and kindred spirit Mary, Rudolf has a higher kiss count than any other male role in all of ballet.
After rehearsing her big group number as Mitzi, Isabel pulled me aside in the Salon and muttered into my ear, ‘I had no idea.’
‘No idea about what?’
‘How good he is. I can never tell Charlie.’ Her shoulders gave a little involuntary shimmy. ‘Isn’t it mad how one kiss can make you feel nineteen again? You must be having a scrummy time with him.’
‘I don’t know if I’d put it like that.’
Sander and I had only ever kissed in The Sleeping Beauty, briefly and chastely. In Mayerling, we had to kiss four times in Mary and Rudolf’s first bedroom pas de deux alone, then three more times in the run-up to their death scene.
One week into the new season, my flutters of nervous anticipation for these kisses had flatlined.
What we were doing may have looked like kissing, but there was nothing romantic about it – they were hurdles to clear, messy and chaotic and breathless.
Almost all of them came at the end of a difficult lift, or after I’d clambered down Sander’s body to the floor, my head craned upside down, his body pushing into mine from behind while Salvatore demanded he go lower, harder, more, more, more.
I tried to get off his mouth as much as onto it, just so I didn’t black out.
The light-headedness could only help my character, an impulsive teenager who doesn’t shy away from the skull on Rudolf’s desk, or his gun.
‘Good,’ Salvatore announced as he watched me and Sander land in our most physically challenging kiss: after a series of lifts where I barely touched the ground, blindly trusting that Sander’s hands would catch me, he knelt with me in his arms, holding my left ankle as I extended my left leg across the back of his neck, my right leg tucked in.
We locked lips in the most literal sense of the word, the force of it keeping him steady and me balanced. ‘Very good.’
It didn’t feel very good. With only a few days until the stage call, I was convinced I’d never be able to enjoy kissing again, onstage or off.
The act of it had become defamiliarised, to the point where I questioned whether I’d ever actually enjoyed kissing, or if I just thought I had because I’d grown up being told – by books and films and songs and everyone I knew – that I was meant to enjoy it, that it was biologically hardwired into humans the world over.
At the end of our final studio rehearsal before the run began, Salvatore asked us to do the first bedroom pas de deux one more time.
By now it was all about finishing touches and making sure that, true to the MacMillan vision for all his creations, we were infusing every interaction with meaning.
To quote Crystal: “There’s no half-assing a MacMillan.
” We had to become our characters, whether we liked them or not.
‘Again. Still not quite there yet, that moment,’ Salvatore said, as Sander and I tried not to groan in exasperation.
When Mary enters Rudolf’s bedroom for the first time, she bows to him as etiquette demands, holding the lace-trim lapels of her coat together.
He approaches her with intrigue writ plain on his face – and she removes the coat to reveal only a negligee underneath.
Onstage, I would wear a white leotard under the sheer black fabric, but it was still racy by Dance Hall standards.
Mary turns and swings her leg up high, travelling across the bedroom with the ease and arrogance of a teenage girl whose only asset is her youth, an asset she’ll push as far as it can go.
The scene is a slow tug-of-war, the power and control shifting between her and Rudolf – when he grips her arm, he reminds her that he is the one who will decide how the night plays out, what he’ll get to do with her, and to her.
The moment we hadn’t yet mastered to Salvatore’s satisfaction was when Mary faces Rudolf with her back to the audience; unable to resist, he pulls down the straps of her negligee and, as Sal put it, “takes a good, long look”.
It was all implied – a good leotard won’t just flop down and expose your entire chest with one tug – but the straps did have to come all the way off my shoulders.
Except this time, when Sander complied with Sal’s demand to be rougher, I flinched at the force with which he pushed the straps down my skin, and how cold I suddenly was.
Sander froze, his eyebrows high. He glanced up: Should we stop?
‘No, this is good! Keep going, don’t lose the moment!’ Salvatore said, standing near enough that he definitely saw my nipples, too. Forcing myself to do it as leisurely as I had all the other times, I pushed the straps back up, and the feeling of acid and ice back down my throat.
‘Hey, it’s happened before,’ Sal continued, backing away so we could resume the pas de deux and move across the floor. ‘Carolyn, Mariska, everybody, at least one time. Just learn how to go with it. And be glad it was here, not onstage!’
I forced a laugh.
I got through the rest of the scene, and then we were allowed to call it a day and head home.
I didn’t go home. I went up to the rooftop garden, a little oasis of green and lavender accessible only to staff and patrons.
I couldn’t face cramming myself into a tube carriage with all the rush hour commuters, nor did I want to make small talk with a cabbie in the low-ceilinged box of his car.
I needed air, elevated enough above the congestion of central London and secondhand cigarette smoke that it would taste cold and pure.
I took a Styrofoam cup of tea to one of the benches, the city spread out before me in a panoply of roofs, and put my head in my hands.