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

Melissa Hamilton (Toby) in Wayne McGregor's MaddAdam - (Andrej Uspenski)

Margaret Atwood has an eye for dystopia, and her MaddAdam trilogy of novels doesn’t stint on bad news. Humanity has trashed the planet and is all but wiped out in turn. It’s a good basis for nightmares, no question – but for ballet?

Wayne McGregor previously drew magic from Virginia Woolf and Dante, so isn’t daunted. The result is as vauntingly ambitious and helplessly flawed as the humanity it portrays.

Rethinking nearly 1,500 pages as 100 minutes of dance, the ballet (which premiered in Toronto in 2022) doesn’t trace the novels’ beats – but the scraps of narrative McGregor gives aren’t helpful. The more the production explains (childlike voiceover, projected names and dates), the more it baffles. When it responds abstractly to Atwood’s ideas, it soars into something richly beautiful.

(Andrej Uspenski)

It opens in a boggle of characters. We meet the scientist Crake (William Bracewell on opening night), who engineers both a catastrophe and an improved race of hominids, plus his lover Oryx (Fumi Kaneko) and friend Jimmy (Joseph Sissens); and also the pacifist Toby (Melissa Hamilton) and her tangled relationships.

McGregor, always a fascinating movement-maker, creates a luxuriantly involved trio for Jimmy, Oryx and Crake. They stretch wide, as if they have all the time in the world, to Max Richter’s layered, lulling melody, which recurs enticingly through the evening.

William Bracewell (Crake) and Fumi Kaneko (Oryx) (Andrej Uspenski)

The second act, a defiantly busy collage and “interactive biofreak” video game, plays out beneath a stalactite city hanging toothily from the ceiling (striking designs by architects We Not I). Dancers in spotless white are blank canvases in this swiftly degraded utopia. Bracewell’s terrific solos capture Crake’s delusive certainty in hyper-rational straight lines, turns sharp as a cleaver. As his planned catastrophe takes effect, Bracewell swooshes exultantly around the stage, grandiloquent hands reaching for the skies.

McGregor’s previous full-length ballets each staged a reckoning. Virginia Woolf took stock of her life; Dante’s sinners and believers met judgement in the hereafter. Here, humanity must face our failed custody of the planet.

(Andrej Uspenski)

The final act leaps past Atwood’s narrative and into a future where engineered humans live peaceably alongside lumbering hybrid creatures, building warm rituals and origin stories. Dancers in kingfisher blue swim through the air and skim over the floor, released into harmony. We see versions of characters from previous acts, their knotty moves now joyously unfurled. They can at last dance their best intentions, persist as memories of their best selves.

From the beginning, we’ve seen Jimmy tormented by the past but still drawing on empathy – a superb Sissens spins from haunted, jerky solos into slinky hedonism, finally bringing grace to our broken world. The gorgeous closing dances certainly move beyond Atwood’s dire warnings.

But, she has also noted, humanity is “doomed to hope” – and the ballet leaves us clinging on to dance and music.

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