Review: MADDADDAM, Royal Opera House

Whether on the news or on Netflix, dystopia seems the theme of the year. With a disturbing score from Max Richter, Wayne McGregor’s enthralling and infuriating interpretation of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy is a panoramic work that peers into a future which is all too plausible and none too palatable.

Arguably the queen of dystopic fiction, the Canadian author is and is probably best known for 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a horrifying vision of a fundamentalist USA where women are perceived as little more than baby factories. If that sounds too close to reality, consider the plot of Maddaddam: in a world where a reality game called Painball sees contestants tortured for the pleasure of the watching audience and gene splicing is common, the scientist Crake creates a species of gentle herbivorous and polyandrous humanoids he calls Crakers and devises a popular Viagra-like pill that induces euphoria. 

Unknown to its users, the drug is secretly designed to “cure” what Crake perceives as the world’s overpopulation problem. In the ensuing global pandemic, he is one of the few alongside his friend Jimmy (also known as Snowman) and their mutual lover Oryx. Later books introduce us to God’s Gardeners, an environmentalist cult which predicted what they call “The Waterless Flood” and other strange creatures like the bulbous pigoons.

This co-production between the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada debuted in Toronto in 2022 and makes its European premiere in Covent Garden. In many ways, this is an artistic sequel to McGregor’s first full-length ballet Woolf Works, another cinematic outing which took three related books and realised them through music from Richter, projections from Ravi Deepres and lighting from Lucy Carter. Dramaturgist Uzma Hameed worked on both and it is in the storytelling that Maddaddam is at its best and its worst.

Let’s get the worst out of the way first. In going from the page to the stage, the plot (such as it is) is split into three segments. Fans of the books may look on aghast as, rather than have the segments lined up to match the trilogy’s books, McGregor has chosen to re-order their contents into a new form. The first act “Castaway” takes Atwood’s parallel approach a step further and has the romance between Jimmy, Crake and Oryx play out alongside the tale of the Ren, Amanda and the painballer baddies from the second story. The conclusion of the second act “Extinctathon” leads into the beginning of the first while the final act “Dawn” leaves behind those characters to go beyond the end of the last novel and imagine a world where, sans humans, Crakers live in blissful solitude.

This is all in keeping with the famed choregrapher’s style. Next year, his own company will stage Deepstaria which will use Vantablack Vision® technology to create "unfathomable darkness" but here he stares full into the abyss of a bleak future. Whether his interpretation of the source material is innovative or pretentious is down to the individual taste. Atwood is on board as a creative consultant so we should assume she is happy with how her narrative has been restyled for this dance treatment. From murmurs in the pews, it seems that those who have so far yet to read the source material appreciated McGregor’s vision more than those who were expecting a more orthodox re-telling. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: the latest shape to the trilogy means that old fans can find new insights and connections while others can take in the surreal and complex nature of Maddaddam at face value and form their own opinions.

Without such a strong focus on the plot, the aesthetics come into focus to a greater extent, especially the set design and lighting. The former comes care of architectural practice We Not I who also contributed to Woolf Works and here have produced three fantastic landscapes including one with a huge computer monitor and another with an upside-down city above the dancers. Their complexity has a downside: the time taken to change from one set to another means that there are two intervals which add up to almost an hour. And when it comes to setting the mood and delivering on both the dark underbelly of Atwood’s often violent world as seen in the first two acts and the optimistic finale, Deepres and Carter are simply outstanding.

Richter’s score and McGregor’s choreography are both brilliant and predictable. The composer already has form when it comes to soundtracking speculative fiction which has hit home long after it was released with his work for the highly underrated The Leftovers and here he leans once again on soaring violins and plinky piano until he remembers that there is a wind section too he can make us of; McGregor is more a fan of electronica so there are slabs of keyboard music as well as vocoded speech. The physicality is, as always, highly expressive and varied as he mixes up swirling movements, frothing group action and some stunning solos. He pulls us in, he lets us go and he drags us back all within the space of each act.

While the drama is nothing to write home about, this is a visual and aural tour de force that demands a revival. Let’s hope it comes back while its topics can still be considered fictitious.

Maddaddam continues until 30 November.

Photo credit: Andrej Uspenski

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