In the likes of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty love is an ideal. It’s beautiful and romantic and pure. Kenneth MacMillan wasn’t having any of that. His Manon is a love story but doesn’t pretend to be all high-minded when body is pressed intimately against body, which is so often the case in Manon. This ballet is about sex: sex as power, as need, as currency, as natural impulse and as a force that can destroy.

The Australian Ballet’s Manon: Robyn Hendricks and Callum Linnane. Photo © Kate Longle

Manon, a young woman inexperienced in the ways of the world, has two choices. One is a rapturous, love-at-first-sight union with an impecunious student; the other is a glamorous but equivocal life under the protection of a rich older man, a situation engineered for profit by her own brother. 

She vacillates between both paths and they collide with predictably tragic consequences.

The story unfolds in a series of pas de deux for the title character and her young...