The opening night of the Royal Ballet season was special in more ways than one. Not only was it a subsidised evening (thanks to the Helen Hamlyn Trust) that enabled readers of The Sun to buy seats at knockdown prices, it also marked the beginning of yet another Kenneth MacMillan celebration. This one is in recognition of what would have been the choreographer’s 80th birthday.

Certainly Mayerling (1978) is one of the late choreographer’s most important creations, and with its mix of sex, drugs and misbehaving royals its subject matter is familiar territory to tabloid readers. But what this “new” audience made of the ballet’s complex narrative and bulging cast list is anyone’s guess. There are so many characters — most of them women — at loose in Mayerling that it practically takes a flow chart to keep them all straight.

The ballet is based on the true story of Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, who killed himself and his young mistress Mary at the royal hunting lodge of Mayerling in 1889. He was also, if MacMillan is to be believed, an oversexed sadist, violent gun fetishist and hopeless drug addict who couldn’t look at a woman without wanting to conquer her. Nicholas Georgiadis’s designs evoke the smug superiority of the Viennese imperial court in which Rudolf is drowning.

There is a lot of narrative ground to cover, some of which could quite happily be trimmed (the brothel scene, the emperor’s birthday party), but the ballet’s strength lies in the amazing pas de deux for Rudolf and his lovers. There’s his wife Stephanie (the rough sex on her wedding night was surely more than she bargained for) and his teenage mistress Mary Vetsera, who goes along with his suicidal fantasies in the misguided belief that she’s dying for love. It’s here that MacMillan’s genius for pumping raw emotion through the veins of dance is at its most effulgent.

Leading the cast on opening night was Edward Watson. His demented prince had a shaky start technically (especially in the slow passages), and because he started the ballet as he meant to finish it — in a state of haunted anguish — he didn’t have far to travel. But his performance became more effective as the evening went on, and by Act III his Rudolf was at his glorious worst. Mara Galeazzi also needed time to boil, but for all her beautifully formed dancing she never quite conveyed the dangerous intensity that drives Mary to her death.

Box office: 020-7304 4000, to Nov 10

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