★★★½☆ Glorious music and stellar dancing rescues routine re-imagining.

Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
April 1, 2016

Among the canon of 19th-century classical ballet, no work has been fiddled around with quite like Swan Lake. There have been daring re-inventions – Matthew Bourne’s all-male version, for example, has thrilled the world – but the desire to ‘fix’ perceived weaknesses with the storyline started immediately the curtain came down on the disastrously received 1877 premiere (unbelievably, not even the score was praised back then). Among the more applauded takes in recent decades is Graeme Murphy’s dazzling account for the Australian Ballet which, although intensely revisionist in terms of storytelling through music, retains a comfortable fin de siècle period beauty.

Photo by Daniel Boud

Australian Ballet resident choreographer Stephen Baynes’ four-year-old staging was an attempt to create a ‘traditional’ Swan Lake to sit in rep next to Murphy’s. In many ways, that seems hardly necessary (looked at from most angles, its popular predecessor seems entirely fit for purpose). Nevertheless, Baynes had a crack at it and came up with a rather lacklustre Russo-Ruritanian mishmash mixing the 1895 Kirov production and his own limited...