Swan Lake is a beautiful ballet and will be around for generations to come, loved by all, but I do not equate it with the likes of Edward V11, Camilla, Dianne and Charles, Edward & Wallace, people with nothing better to do than r... around.

What disgusting tripe.

The "arts" meeds a good kick in the bum for continually wanting to hang their puerile rubbish on someone else.

Can't we please let a little tart, who married a prince die & be forgotten? Hanging a bit of "the arts" on her, in the hope it will bring in more paying customers is rather sick.

Hi Hasbeen

This piece is better than a yawn of alphabet noodles, but.

Cheers

Pete

I saw Swan Lake again recently in Dublin. Yes, it’s a gorgeous ballet. The music and the dancing really blow you away. The story, however – like most ballet stories – is crap.

But really … do we have to revisit that embarrassing Princess Di mass affliction again? Surely we should forget that unfortunate period when millions of otherwise intelligent people got hit with some mysterious mass frenzy of grief by media. Why are we such a pushover for stricken princesses?

Princesses are different. They do not represent real life. They do not represent real women.

Having seen a handful of ballet productions over the years, it has always seemed to me that the actual storyline comes a distant third to the dancing and the music. Much as in opera, where the story can be marginally - or even totally - absurd, but the performance itself be artistically satisfying and wholly enjoyable.

Trying to bend Swan Lake into some kind of quasi Diana story seems supremely pointless, as there are simply no parallels whatsoever between the fantasy characters for whom Tchaikovsky wrote the music, and those real people involved in "the tumultuous marriage of Charles and Dianna [sic]" identified by Ms Prior.

I suspect that the success of Murphy's production is, as usual, down to the talent of the performers, and not to some spurious storyline connection with historic events.

Killarney very true, story lines are mostly absurd in both ballet and opera, but when viewing we tend to overlook the silliness of it all, death by anything is the motto, but do not bring both ballet & opera down to the level of a Royal Family whose antics owing to excess wealth and nothing to do have no bearing on the movements of ballet or the singing in opera, they are only interested in movement into any millionaires bed who takes their fancy at the time, but never the garbage collector which ballet & opera story lines mainly are all about.