Dance review: Victoria

Queen Victoria was the ultimate control freak, never more so than when it came to her children’s lives. She kept her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, close to her throughout her entire life, never allowing Beatrice to break away and find fulfilment elsewhere – Victoria even insisted Beatrice and her husband live with her after their marriage.

It is this domineering relationship which is at the heart of Northern Ballet’s new work by Cathy Marston. Victoria shows how Beatrice took it upon herself to edit her mother’s diaries after the monarch’s death, so preserving an image she thought fit for the public. So out went references to Victoria’s friendship with the servant John Brown, and details of her passionate and intensely physical relationship with Prince Albert were also censored.

Marston has attempted to address various events in Victoria’s life in a series of short episodes, not all of which work. We see Victoria torn by grief in widow’s weeds; jealously forbidding Beatrice’s marriage – then relenting; becoming Empress of India and giving birth, rather swiftly, to her nine children.

The choreography is not purely classical: pointe shoes are worn but leg movements are often jagged, and arms are held aloft but straight. The nearest we come to traditional classicism is in Victoria’s passionate – and explicit – pas de deux with her husband on their wedding night. At this point, the music, by Philip Feeney, becomes its most Chopin-like. By the end of the ballet we find Beatrice with a little more understanding of the woman who was her mother as well as her sovereign.