Anna Karenina, Royal Opera House, London, dance review: 'A lightweight, underpowered production'

Diana Vishneva’s stillness is the best thing in the Mariinsky Ballet’s Anna Karenina. After declaring her love for Vronsky, she gazes out at the audience, her expressive face filled with misgiving and fear for the future. It’s a rare moment of emotional depth in a lightweight, underpowered production.

Vishneva is one of the St Petersburg company’s biggest stars, an international name. Now 41, she is making changes to her career, focusing more on dramatic works; she bade farewell to American Ballet Theatre, her other company, earlier this year. Based on Tolstoy’s novel, Alexei Ratmansky’s Anna Karenina should give her a meaty role, but instead feels rushed and thin.

Ratmansky, a gifted and in-demand choreographer, has a fascination with Russian dance history. For this production, created in 2010, he turned to Rodion Shchedrin’s 1972 score, originally written for ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. It’s claustrophobic music: full of dramatic clashes, it rarely opens out enough for dance set pieces.

The choreography is all process, hurrying through the story without slowing down enough to explore it. The narrative is clear: married Anna falls in love with Vronsky, is ostracised by society and kept away from her young son, and finally commits suicide. But who are these people?

Ratmansky, who can be so vivid and particular with, say, Shostakovich, here makes fluently bland steps. His court dances don’t get beyond background decoration, while his dramatic scenes are full of gesticulation. It’s only when he slows right down that this Anna Karenina gathers momentum. Anna disgraces herself at the races, so concerned for Vronsky that she bumps into the Tsar himself. The court’s frozen outrage is more interesting than their dancing.

Mikael Melbye designs a spare, open set, with video projections by Wendall Harrington that move the action swiftly from the railway station to grand houses, from St Petersburg to Venice. Melbye’s costumes recreate period shapes in light fabrics and bold colours. The train, a piece of built scenery, looms over the action, repeatedly brought on stage and turned around.

Vishneva brings warmth and fluid line to Ratmansky’s dances, and vivid presence to every scrap of mime. She uses her dark eyes wonderfully: watching her husband, her lover and her son, she shows Anna torn between conflicting needs. Viktor Baranov suggests repressed feeling under Karenin’s coldness, while Konstantin Zverev makes Vronsky a handsome, energetic presence. Svetlana Ivanova and Filipp Stepin are brisk and elegant as Kitty and Levin, though their roles are too underdrawn to offer much contrast with Anna’s relationships.

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