Marianela: Timeless review – perfect ballerina shows off a leg-whipping, frictionless mastery

Is there such a thing as being too perfect? Marianela Nuñez is certainly one of the most perfect ballerinas around. At 44, she still has superlative technique and absolute command. She can reel off a fiendish string of fouettés (as in tonight’s extract from Le Corsaire), whipping her leg in circles, and then come to a gentle standstill, the smoothest brakes you ever saw. It is absolutely frictionless; it is beauty and capability and egoless self-possession. And this might seem an unfair ask, but do we sometimes also need a little grit?

Timeless is Nuñez’s first solo show. Not truly solo, but she’s the star, it’s her choice of repertoire, and she does everything “just right”, paying tribute to the Royal Ballet, the company she joined at 16, and its choreographers: Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor. She also offers an amazing showcase of the company’s dancers and generously allows them to shine, so much so that Matthew Ball and Mayara Magri dancing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet is an absolute highlight, Magri giddy as she watches her Romeo swoop manfully around the stage. Akane Takada and Calvin Richardson are tender in a duet from McGregor’s Infra, and Fumi Kaneko and Lukas B Braendsrød dance Wheeldon’s serene After the Rain – although they can’t fill the long phrases in the exquisite way Nuñez once did with Thiago Soares.