Manon and Carmen

In 1973, the Royal Ballet star Antoinette Sibley found a cryptic message from Kenneth MacMillan, the company’s director, in her dressing room before a performance of Swan Lake. It was a copy of Abbe Prevost's novella, Manon Lescaut, with an inscription: “Darling Antoinette, some holiday reading for you which will come in handy March 7, 1974.” Obviously, he was about to make a new role for her in a ballet that would premiere on that night. But the book was a double publication, and also contained Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen. Which one would Sibley be dancing? Unable to wait until the end of the performance, she asked her Prince Siegfried, Antony Dowell, to run out and find MacMillan. He came back with the news: it was Manon. MacMillan’s ballet version of the novella would become his most famous work – but we can’t help imagining what MacMillan’s Carmen might have been like.

So why did Everyman’s Library pair Manon Lescaut with Carmen in the first place? Although they are written almost a century apart – 1731 and 1845, respectively – they’re superficially similar. A seductive woman inflames every man she meets, and comes to grief at the hands of a jealous lover. But the two heroines have very different backgrounds, psyches and choices.

The Manon of MacMillan’s ballet is less calculating and less experienced than the Manon of Abbe Prevost's book. On her way to a convent, she meets the young Chevalier des Grieux, and they fall for each other in a swooping, ecstatic pas de deux. But Manon can’t stay the course of their love – she’s soon lured away by the diamonds of Monsieur G.M. When Manon premiered at Covent Garden, the English critics were shell-shocked to see the elegant, blonde Sibley whoring and card-sharping. “Basically, Manon is a slut and Des Grieux is a fool and they move in the most unsavoury company …” sniffed The Guardian. The Morning Star lamented that Sibley had been “reduced to a nasty little diamond digger”.

But MacMillan saw Manon differently, as someone caught in the ruthless machinery of an unjust society, with sex her only means of making herself secure. Perhaps her fatal flaw is her weather-vane nature. When she’s with des Grieux, her head is turned by their love; when she’s with Monsieur G.M., she’s dazzled by the luxury and status he offers. Trying to have it both ways, she falls between the cracks and meets a dismal end as a transported convict. In his choreography for Manon, MacMillan constantly has her being handled, her limbs manipulated in pas de trois and pas de six with men, “parcelled out” as MacMillan’s wife Deborah once put it. In the last act, the weak and starving Manon is little more than a rag flopping in the hands of her gaoler and her lover.

Carmen is less a rag than a wrecking ball. Her character has remained remarkably true to itself, all the way from Mérimée’s novella through opera and dance and film to the present day. And her most prominent trait – apart from her giddying sex appeal – is her proud, ungovernable will.

Carmen’s first-ever entrance, in Mérimée, is pure swagger. “She had thrown her mantilla back, to show her shoulders, and a great bunch of acacia that was thrust into her chemise. She had another acacia blossom in the corner of her mouth, and she walked along, swaying her hips, like a filly from the Cordova stud farm.” In just about every dance version of Carmen, you see that mix of sex and self-assurance in the choreography. Johann Ingers’ 2015 contemporary-dance work is more explicitly erotic than, say, Roland Petit’s 1949 ballet, but there’s still a basic likeness – the alternation of twining come-ons with haughty go-aways, the exuberant leading of a female group, the impetuous running and stalking. Don José, trying to capture this flame in his hands, doesn’t have a chance. Even when he has her at knifepoint, she refuses to bend to his will. “Carmen will never yield!” she says in the novella. “Free she was born and free she will die!” It makes you long for Carmen to show up in Manon to give Monsieur G.M. and the gaoler what for. She might still meet her fate, but it wouldn’t be limply.

Carmen must be a wonderful role – how exhilarating to embody someone living so richly and wholly in their skin – but Manon offers more nuance to different interpreters. Sibley thought that she “allowed it all to happen to her . . .I don’t think she’s a schemer.” Lynn Seymour saw her as “bandit”, Natalia Makarova thought she lived for the moment, “extracting from it all the excitement she can.” Sylvie Guillem’s Manon wielded sex as power. Other ballerinas have played her as a feather-headed innocent. The depth in the role is one of the main reasons for the ballet’s survival over more than 50 years.

Later in her life, Sibley said that if she were the soppy type, she’d like to die holding her costumes for Manon and Titania (from Frederick Ashton’s The Dream) in her arms. Perhaps, on an alternate plane, she’s holding a scarlet dress from Macmillan’s Carmen, as well.