CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Dance Review: Victoria, Leeds Grand Theatre/Touring
Northern Ballet delivers a history lesson through the relationship between Queen Victoria and her daughter Beatrice
Ferocious: Abigail Prudames as Victoria
[Emma Kauldhar]
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CREATED to mark the bicentenary of Queen Victoria’s birth, this new production from Northern Ballet is very much an exercise in historiography.
It’s told through the eyes of her youngest daughter Beatrice, who in the first act examines how she was cast in the role of companion and literary executioner to her mother. In the second act, she reads pages of the queen’s diaries and in a sequences of flashbacks discovers the circumstances that moulded Victoria’s character.
Ever present, Pippa Moore’s Beatrice both observes and rewrites history through the pages she peruses and excises and, in some of the most powerful scenes, she gains self-awareness by observing her younger version, played by Miki Akuta.
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