When Natalia Osipova started rehearsals for her first ever play, it didn’t go well. “I cry. I’m shaking. I’m stressed and completely lost on the first day,” she reports. “I think, ‘I’m a piece of shit!’ I want to take a taxi and run away.”
It’s the second week of rehearsals when we meet, and Osipova is still here. The Royal Ballet principal plays a Russian ballerina from a previous age: Lydia Lopokova, who danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, then in 1925 unexpectedly married British economist John Maynard Keynes, who is the protagonist of James Graham’s The Standard of Living – a play about, among other things, taking risks and imagining a brave new future.
Acting is central to ballet’s appeal for Osipova. “Maybe I’ll never be super perfect for classical ballet because I love stories so much,” she says. Even so, she demurred when former colleague Edward Watson suggested she audition. “You’re stupid!” was his retort. “You need to try because it’s amazing opportunity.”
A delicate silver necklace shines beneath frank brown eyes. Osipova requested a translator in our previous interviews, but today speaks in an idiosyncratic gallop not unlike Lopokova’s own. Entering Nicholas Hytner’s rehearsal room, joining a classy cast led by Rory Kinnear, she felt like Lydia among Keynes’s sneery Bloomsbury friends. “I left rehearsal and cried,” she says, “because I feel, ‘Oh my god, I’m so bad.’ But you learn and listen and every day, step by step, I do better.”
