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Five balletic love triangles

14 February 2012

While classical ballet often features pairs of star-crossed young lovers, it's also full of fifth wheels. Here are five love-triangles from Birmingham Royal Ballet's current repertory:

Oberon, Titania and Bottom from The Dream

A particularly unique love triangle, in that it would probably be better if all three of the people involved went their separate ways.

Oberon is King of the fairies. Titania is Queen of the fairies. Bottom is neither regal nor magical, and is notable only for unwittingly finding himself cast in the title role of an unseemly trick that Oberon decides to play on his wife. 'Enchanting' is a word used most often to describe a delightfully sublime or transcendant experience. Here though it involves the King first of all giving Bottom the head of a donkey, then magically making Titania falling for the mule-like fool. These folks are possibly beyond the reach of marriage guidance counselling...

Bathsheba Everdene, Gabriel Oak and William Boldwood. And Francis Troy. From Far From The Madding Crowd.

Strictly speaking this is more of a love pyramid, with Bathsheba at the top and the three men all clamouring for her affections from the lower three corners. Will she choose Gabriel, the longtime friend who works as a shepherd on the farm she owns and fell in love with her the first time they met? Will she choose the prosperous but repressed Boldwood, an older-gentleman whose ardour she unintentionally inflames after sending him a Valentine's card as a joke? Will she choose the wild and exciting Sergeant Troy, a dangerous gambler and notorious womaniser?

And more pressingly, will she make her mind before one of them leaves, one of them goes insane, and one of them (possibly) drowns? Probably not.

Giselle, Albrecht and Hilarion from Giselle

Next on our list is this tale of humble folk in the middle ages. Hilarion is in love with Giselle. Giselle is in love with Albrecht, a rich nobleman masquerading as a farm boy for less than noble kicks. Hilarion discovers, and exposes, the Prince's deceit, along with the fact that he's already betrothed to another. The revelation sends Giselle into a fit of despair, literally breaking her fragile heart and killing her.

The good news is that it's still only Act I, and Giselle of course returns after the interval. The bad news is that she's still very much dead, and the ghosts of a dozen other women-scorned want her for their sorority of vengeance. With Albrecht and Hilarion visiting the cemetery to mourn her death, Giselle must decide if she will choose to save either man from the ghosts' fury...

Prince Siegfried, Odette and Odile from Swan Lake

SPOILER ALERT! This one doesn't end well either. No ghosts this time though, only wizards, evil twins and a flock of enchanted Princesses.

As damsels in distress go, Odette's lot is a pretty distressing one. Kidnapped by the evil Von Rothbart (for reasons often not explained), she spends her days transformed into a swan, forced to swim on a lake apparently made up of the tears still being shed by her grieving mother. Which is fairly dark in anybody's book.

Prince Seigfried spies her while out hunting in the forest by moonlight, a time when Odette is thankfully returned to her human form for a few short hours. The two are immediately smitten, and crucially, if Siegfried declares his undying love for her, Odette's curse will be broken. Keen that this doesn't happen, Von Rothbart transforms his own daughter, Odile, into Odette's double, and sends her to trick the Prince into proclaiming his love for her instead. The results of Odile's successful seduction differ from one production to the next, but suffice to say, few of them have happy endings.

Cyrano, Christian and Roxane from Cyrano

For Cyrano, it doesn't matter if the pen is mightier than the sword, because frankly he's a master with both. A dashing soldier with a talent for the written word, he's only held back from declaring his love for Roxane by the crippling lack of confidence which stems from his enormous nose.

Tragically, his timing is abysmal. Just as he plucks up the nerve to tell Roxane how he feels, she announces her interest in another soldier called Christian. The illiterate Christian then appeals to Cyrano to help ghostwrite love letters to Roxane, which he duly does, pouring his own feelings onto the page.

In another masterstroke of shoddy timing, Cyrano is on the brink of revealing himself as the secret author of the words which have so captured Roxane's heart, when Christian is killed in battle. Unable to tell the grief-striken woman that her relationship with a war-hero was built upon lies, he instead vows to take the secret to his grave, making this arguably the most tragic love triangle of all.

ENDS

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