Screening of The Royal Ballet's Kenneth MacMillan ballet Manon, set to Jules Massenet's score, at the MK Gallery.
MK Gallery is screening The Royal Ballet's Manon on Sunday 1 November, a production that's long been one of the company's signature works. It's Kenneth MacMillan's 1974 adaptation of Abbé Prévost's novel, set to Jules Massenet's score with designs by Nicholas Georgiadis. The screening runs for 190 minutes, so you'll want to clear a good chunk of your afternoon for it.
The story is set in the seedy underbelly of 18th-century Paris and follows Manon, who finds herself caught between two competing desires: her love for the student Des Grieux and the riches promised by Parisian society. It's a classic setup, but MacMillan's version is less about the romance and more about the moral degradation that follows. He had a real knack for human psychology, and that's what drives the story here — the slow slide from love into something far more compromised.
Because it's a screening and not a live performance, you get to see the whole thing as it was captured, with Massenet's score and Georgiadis's designs intact. It's a long one, but that's part of the experience — you're in it for the full arc rather than a condensed version. If you've never seen Manon, it's a good place to start with MacMillan's work, and if you have, it's a chance to revisit it without having to make it all the way to Covent Garden.
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The screening is at MK Gallery, the public art gallery in central Milton Keynes that opened in 1999 and reopened after a major expansion in 2019. It doesn't hold a permanent collection, and the cinema is on the top floor, looking out over Campbell Park. The session starts at 2.00pm on Sunday 1 November, and tickets range from free to £19.
