As Prince Charles prepares for his midlife second marriage, the glamour, tragedy and soap opera of his first are bursting back into life — in dance.
Diana the Princess, a ballet by Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss, opened on Tuesday at Manchester’s Palace Theatre, more than 300km from Buckingham Palace. But it has already created a buzz among royal-watchers.
British newspapers have gleefully suggested that the show savages the royal family while canonising Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. The Daily Telegraph reported that the piece, which premiered in Denmark in 2003 but has never been performed in Britain, portrays the royals as “open-mouthed fools” and Charles’s long-time love Camilla Parker Bowles as “a dominatrix in jodhpurs laying into the Prince of Wales with a whip”.
Diana and her companion, Dodi al Fayed, “are portrayed as saintly figures martyred by the British establishment”, the paper said.
Schaufuss, a former artistic director of the English National Ballet who gave the princess dance lessons in the 1980s, says the show is not an attack on Charles — who has set an April 8 date to marry Parker Bowles in a low-key civil ceremony — or on other members of the royal family.
“The show should be seen as a celebration,” Schaufuss said in an interview a few days before the opening. “It’s a very tasteful show, and I think if anybody is critical of it without seeing it, that’s very unfair.
“Of course it is a tragedy. It started out as a modern fairy tale and sadly it ended the way it did. But I don’t think there are any villains — just circumstances.”
Set to music by English composer Edward Elgar and 1980s goth-pop band The Cure, the piece follows the young princess through her troubled marriage to the heir to the throne and up to her early death.
The soundtrack includes extracts from the 1995 television interview in which Diana acknowledged her affair with former soldier James Hewitt, and noted of Charles’s ongoing relationship with Parker Bowles: “There were three of us in this marriage.”
English dancer Zara Deakin — who, to the delight of amateur psychologists in the media, is also Schaufuss’s wife — plays Diana.
Clearly, Schaufuss is still enthralled by the lanky, elegant princess he met in 1986, five years after her lavish wedding at St Paul’s cathedral. A former dancer with the Bolshoi, Kirov and New York City ballets, in the 1980s Schaufuss led the London Festival Ballet, which later became the English National Ballet. Diana eventually became its patron.
He said the princess would often slip across from her home at Kensington Palace to practise dance at the company’s studios nearby.
“She loved dancing and I think she felt very at peace with herself in our studios because there were no photographers,” Schaufuss said. “This went on for years and, thank God, everybody kept it a secret.
“I think she felt very relaxed being in that environment because there wasn’t any pressure on her to perform.”
Schaufuss now runs a highly regarded company based in the small Danish town of Holstebro. In the past, he has created ballets about Elvis Presley and The Beatles and developed a dance version of the gruelling prison drama Midnight Express. But he says his personal relationship with Diana made this show his hardest task yet.
“At first I thought it would be an advantage,” he said. “But it made it more difficult. When you do pieces on people you haven’t personally known you have a certain amount of freedom — you only get to know them through your research. But when you actually know somebody, it does make it more difficult.”
Schaufuss hopes to bring the show to London’s West End later this year if its five-day run in Manchester goes well. He hopes it will have wide appeal, reviving memories, both sweet and painful, of the “people’s princess” whose memory still lingers over British life.
“It’s very much a family show,” he said. “When you bring young people to a show, it’s important they know the story beforehand. And everybody knows this story.” — Sapa-AP
On the net:
Dianatheprincess.com