Kenneth MacMillan's Manon returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 13 October to 25 November 2026.
Kenneth MacMillan made Manon for the Royal Ballet in 1974, three years into running the company, wanting something full-length and unsparing. He took the story from Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel: a girl on her way to a convent, diverted by a student and then by a richer man, who ends up deported and dead in a Louisiana swamp — and set it not to Massenet’s opera on the same subject but to a score assembled from his other music, which is an odd decision that works.
Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell created the leads. What has kept it in the repertoire is the three pas de deux, which are among the hardest and most physically brutal partnering in ballet, and a heroine written without moral tidying: Manon wants money and pleasure, is punished disproportionately for it, and the ballet declines to say she deserved it. MacMillan later said he had been trying to write a part for a dancer who could act, which the company did not then have in quantity.
It runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Tuesday 13 October to Wednesday 25 November 2026 — six weeks, the company’s longest autumn booking — and is relayed to cinemas during the run. It overlaps Carmen in the same house for a month, which puts the two great unrepentant women of the nineteenth century on one stage in one season.