Ballet: Manon

Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, based on the novel Histoire du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by Abbe Prevost, is a masterpiece of the literary ballet genre and tells the story, beginning passionately and ending in inconsolable sorrow, of the title character’s love for Des Grieux in a world that shifts between splendour and poverty: 

“Manon is not so much afraid of being poor as ashamed of being poor. Poverty in that period was the equivalent of long, slow death.” (Kenneth MacMillan)