When the curtain goes up at Covent Garden to reveal Carlos Acosta, Cuban legend and leading man, standing on his own, one hand held aloft like a statue, white tights topped by what could be thought of as a shred of a toga, it is a moment of uncanny deja vu. He looks not so much 50 as immortal – back on the Royal Opera House stage (where he last performed in 2016) for a gorgeously miscellaneous crowd-pleaser, a five-night gala, to celebrate his half century.
George Balanchine’s Apollo, which Acosta danced with Darcey Bussell in 2007, is one of his favourite pieces, and the section he dances from it makes a miraculous start. But Carlos at 50 – a mix of scenes lifted from ballets and discrete pieces – depends not on miracles but on toil, self-belief and pacing. Acosta’s comeback is harder than any rock star’s because the age-defying expectation is on an exactingly different level. As he joked in an interview with Sarah Crompton in the Observer: “I have to do it in a way that I can still walk off and you don’t have to call an ambulance for me.”
