Wayne McGregor's MaddAddam Review ★★★★★

It's complicated. If you haven’t read Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy - Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam – read the synopsis. If you have read the books, read the synopsis anyway, because Wayne McGregor’s adaptation is very much his own thing.

A deeply thoughtful man, with twin interests in science and philosophy, the choreographer found much to like in the Canadian novelist’s post-apocalyptic world, with its contemporary resonances. And so he assembled a large team including regular collaborators composer Max Richter, dramaturg Uzma Hameed, lighting designer Lucy Carter and film designer Ravi Deepres (leading a list of production credits that fills an entire A5 page) to create his own MaddAddam.

More than a ballet, this co-production with the National Ballet of Canada is a multifaceted opus on a vast scale, perhaps even more so than McGregor’s previous three-Act works for the Royal Ballet, Woolf Works and The Dante Project.

It opens with an extended depiction of the catastrophic conflagration that led to the extinction of most of the human race, with the human figures on stage dwarfed by the dark, swirling film projections, our attention fixed on the voiceover narration - ’in the beginning there was chaos…’

In its aftermath one survivor is left: Jimmy, danced in the first cast by new principal Joseph Sissens.


Joseph Sissens (Jimmy) in Wayne McGregor's MADDADDAM © 2024 RBO. Photo: Andrej Uspenski

Act I, 'Castaway', gradually introduces other survivors, good and bad, including the guileless hominids, the Crakers, and the grotesque hybrids Pigoons, mixing them with Jimmy’s memories, particularly of his friend and love rival Crake (William Bracewell), the scientist who bio-engineered the ultimate catastrophe, and the woman both loved, Oryx (the luminous Fumi Kaneko).


Joseph Sissens (Jimmy), Fumi Kaneko (Oryx), William Bracewell (Crake) in Wayne McGregor's MADDADDAM ©2 024 RBO. Photo: Andrej Uspenski

Act II, 'Extinctathon', takes the story to times before and is framed as the titular computer game Jimmy and Crake used to play as children. All persons are dressed alike in short white tunics and denoted solely by Player numbers. It’s danced entirely behind a scrim where computer game instructions are projected in green letters. Time whizzes backwards and forwards in a confusing manner. The end, with only one player surviving, leads to the beginning of Act I.

Act Three, 'Dawn,' is the future. The calmest and most harmonious of the three, it is peopled by the descendants of the original characters, including Blackbeard, mesmerisingly danced by one of the Royal Ballet’s brightest young things, Marco Masciari.


Marco Masciari (Descendant Blackbeard) in Wayne McGregor's MADDADDAM, The Royal Ballet © 2024 RBO. Photo: Andrej Uspenski

You have to admire the ambition. Richter’s score, played with tremendous verve by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Koen Kessels, is cinematic, eclectic, including electronic distortion, and occasionally bombastic. Carter’s lighting is atmospheric, if sometimes too gloomy. The film projections are powerful. And, of course, the large cast of Royal Ballet dancers on top form are always a pleasure to watch.

That said, MaddAddam is strangely uninvolving. It all seems to happen out there somewhere, and you never hanker to know what comes next, surely a fault in a narrative work. And McGregor’s choreography, peppered with his pet likes - six o’clock arabesques, en arrière or a la seconde, flying lifts, angular arms – feels generic, failing to give each of the protagonists their own character.