Royal Opera House, London
Wayne McGregor’s take on the novelist’s complex tale is ambitious, beautiful and, though wanting in some parts, redeemed by incredible performances

It makes complete sense that Wayne McGregor would be attracted to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, the story of a scientist who engineers a perfect race of people. McGregor’s own choreography so often seems an attempt to transcend the limitations of the body, embracing technology, streamlining the messiness of fallible humans. To stage Atwood’s complex world is a colossal challenge, but McGregor revels in a big vision. He has made a ballet that’s epic, ambitious, flawed, in parts inspired, in others wanting, often beautiful and not for a moment boring.

MaddAddam was premiered by National Ballet of Canada in 2022 to mixed reviews, and it has had some tweaks for this European premiere by the Royal Ballet, including a voiceover by Tilda Swinton (McGregor’s never less than high-end when it comes to collaborators), which goes some way to quelling narrative confusion. McGregor (with dramaturg Uzma Hameed) is never interested in just rehashing a story across three acts. The source material is a prompt, a proposition to bounce off, although there’s plenty of Atwood’s prescient books (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam) in here.

The first act finds Snowman, AKA Jimmy (Joseph Sissens) up a tree, after a global pandemic-fuelled apocalypse, which has been bioengineered by his best friend, Crake (William Bracewell in black-clad tech guru mode), in parallel with the creation of a new, more innocent race, the Crakers. Past and present blur. Another survivor, Toby (Melissa Hamilton) duets with a distant, now unreachable lover (Lukas B Brændsrød) and rocks some of designer Gareth Pugh’s eclectic postapocalyptic fashion: a dusky pink jumpsuit and a rifle. Ravi Deepres’ projections bring startling visions, imagined and all too real.

The second act rewinds and fast-forwards, presenting character after character – including the gene-spliced hybrid creatures pigoons – more of a roll call than an exploration, and misses some potential dramatic crunch points. The final act projects itself beyond the books into a speculative future and the mythmaking of the next generation, some of this cleverly done. It’s a lot to digest in real time.