Princes don’t always get happy endings. Mayerling is a very adult ballet which chronicles the lead-up to the mysterious death of a real-life heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet achieves a nervous balance between sprawling grandiosity and choreographic invention, beginning with the pomp of a royal wedding for Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, before plunging  into a sordid world of degenerate depravity where sex is both a weapon and a last resort. Rudolf’s bride – a cousin he neither knows nor loves – her sister, his mistress and his mother are all tangled up in his obsessions.

Mayerling compresses the final eight years of Rudolf’s life into a relentless downward spiral of political intrigue, drugs and murder.

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