Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev was no doubt a phenomenal dancer and an electrifying personality – nobody who saw him on stage could deny it. Those who knew or collaborated with him also remarked on his fierce intelligence, insatiable ambition and inexhaustible energy. Alas none of these great qualities made him a good choreographer and he lacked the humility to recognise that. His version of Romeo & Juliet, commissioned by London Festival (now English National) Ballet in 1977, provides stark evidence of his overreach.

I was never Rudolf Nureyev’s greatest fan. I must have seen him dance 30 or 40 times, starting with a Bayadère in the mid-1960s, and while his sheer presence remained so potent that he was always exciting to witness, I became increasingly aware of how fiercely willed his dancing was – a struggle with or against his own body, almost self-punishing (he believed that he performed at his best when he was totally exhausted). His final appearances, when he was showing symptoms of the Aids that killed him in 1993, were truly painful to watch on that score. He really had nothing left to give, but the compulsion remained.