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Pretty Woman

La Dame aux camélias” conveys the pain of the tragic love story between the celebrated, generous and doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier and the passionate, idealistic and tormented Armand Duval. But it also brings with it the bitter realisation that even the strongest feelings, and the future they seem to promise, often succumb to the hard weight of reality. Now more than ever, in a world where love appears freer than it once was, we are forced to recognise that passion, and still more profoundly the hope of being seen beyond the role society has assigned to us, create bonds that remain fragile, often clashing with social acceptance and with the prospect of a shared life. This is the true force of the tragedy, which endures beyond time and across its many adaptations.

Performance

Paris Opera Ballet: “La Dame aux Camélias” by John Neumeier

Place

Palais Garnier, Paris, May 5, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Amandine Albisson and Hugo Marchand in “Lady of the Camellias” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Maria Helena Buckley | OnP

The story is autobiographical: Alexandre Dumas fils transposed into the novel his own equally intense and impossible love, shaped by the social norms and hard logic of money that had marked it from the start. Forced to part from the courtesan Marie Duplessis, whose costly way of life belonged to a world he could not sustain, and later devastated by her death, he wrote La Dame aux Camélias in the space of a month. John Neumeier brought the story to the stage in 1978, with theatrical choices that still feel striking today, such as the stage already open and fully lit as the audience enters the theatre. This creates an unsettling continuity between the spectators and the desolate, decadent nineteenth-century interior of Marguerite’s home shortly after her death, marked by an ‘à vendre’ sign dated 1847. Figures move through the space, accompanied only by the sound of their footsteps, until the piano begins to play fragments from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58, opening a score made entirely from his music. From this point on, the whole ballet unfolds as a long flashback, in successive episodes that give the drama its sense of retrospective inevitability.

Armand, danced by a splendid Hugo Marchand, enters in mourning and disbelief and, finding the dress of his beloved, holds it tenderly against himself. The stage then slips into the past and fills with couples at a social gathering, with Marguerite standing apart, interpreted with majestic tenderness by Amandine Albisson. Around her, the corps de ballet astounds, with several audience favourites recognisable among them, including Letizia Galloni, partnered by Shale Wagman. The guests watch a play within the play: the sad story of Manon Lescaut and Des Grieux, wonderfully brought to life by Sae Eun Park and Jérémy-Loup Quer, who appear as pale, ghostly figures in eighteenth-century costumes. Dumas was inspired by Antoine François Prévost’s Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, first published little more than a century earlier, which he had read before writing his own novel; he also depicts Armand himself reading Prévost’s text. Neumeier draws on this intertextuality to create a drama within the drama, in which Marguerite’s story is reflected in Manon’s as both a bad omen and a distorting mirror. This mise en abyme is accompanied by other almost cinematic devices: freeze frames when the real and literary protagonists meet, metatheatrical choices such as the piano being played on stage, and the extension of the stage wings towards the audience, used for the more intimate and introspective scenes.

Amandine Albisson and Hugo Marchand in “Lady of the Camellias” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Maria Helena Buckley | OnP

Amandine Albisson and Hugo Marchand in “Lady of the Camellias” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Maria Helena Buckley | OnP

In the first Act, the love between Marguerite and Armand reaches its fullest choreographic expression in the bedroom pas de deux, although the moment feels less passionate than one might expect. To suggest the turbulence of Marguerite’s social life, in an atmosphere that inevitably recalls Verdi’s “La Traviata” and the feverish excesses of Violetta’s world, Neumeier imagines a sequence of balls in a whirl of chromatic effects: a blue ball gives way to a red masked ball, and then to a white ball with an equestrian inflection, accompanied by a dizzying succession of costume changes for Marguerite. Bianca Scudamore’s commanding stage presence and eye-catching technique make Olympia stand out, filling the stage with explosive theatricality at every entrance. Antonio Conforti brings elegance and brilliance to Gaston Rieux, while Roxane Stojanov gives Prudence Duvernoy radiant, coquettish vitality.

The second Act is set at Marguerite’s countryside house, with large wicker chairs and the three suitors, Alexander Maryianowski, Micah Levine and Enzo Saugar, all bringing vivid comic energy to the scene. The Duke, Marguerite’s wealthy protector, is danced by Arthus Raveau with finely calibrated sinister authority. A striking artist whom one hopes to see entrusted with more prominent roles, Raveau had already shown his gift for darkness and charisma as Hilarion in “Giselle” earlier this Opéra season. His arrival interrupts the festivities. It is only when Marguerite and Armand are finally alone that the two protagonists acquire greater depth and substance, in a pas de deux full of tension and abandon. What follows is the painful confrontation with Armand’s father, danced by Yann Saïz, ending in a powerful condensation of the ballet’s central tensions: the world of wealth, jewels and social exchange on the one hand, and, on the other, Marguerite’s emotional life, mirrored once again in the re-emerging drama of Manon, whose spectral presence rises to the surface.

The third Act opens on the Champs-Élysées, with the crowd promenading across the stage and Armand trying to make Marguerite jealous by flirting with Olympia, while Bianca Scudamore reveals all the sly, seductive and serpentine qualities of the character. After meeting Armand for the last time and begging him to leave Olympia, Marguerite is soon haunted in her dreams by the ghost of Manon, who seems to tempt her back towards the life she had tried to leave behind. Yet Marguerite emerges as a nobler version of her literary double: morally lucid, tender-hearted and capable of sacrifice. Another ball, this time golden and filled with fans, once again evokes the lightness and emptiness of the demi-monde, as Armand publicly humiliates Marguerite by offering her money. She later returns to the theatre and lingers painfully over the chair where he was sitting when they first met. Marguerite, whose sickness has shadowed her from the opening scene, dies alone, without ever seeing Armand again, while he appears in the right wing, turning the pages of her diary, where she has confessed the full extent of her love.

Antonio Conforti and Roxane Stojano in “Lady of the Camellias” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Maria Helena Buckley | OnP

Antonio Conforti and Roxane Stojano in “Lady of the Camellias” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Maria Helena Buckley | OnP

Neumeier’s conception contains many fascinating ideas, and his dramaturgical machinery is rich and intelligent. The choice of Chopin is both fascinating and difficult: not only because his music was not conceived for dance, as even his sister Ludwika’s anxiety over the use of one of his mazurkas at a social gathering suggests, but also because it already contains an entire world, not easily absorbed into ballet. Yet this challenge was met with the greatest refinement by the two pianists, Frédéric Vaysse-Knitter and Michał Białk, and by Markus Lehtinen’s remarkable musical direction. The ballet’s structure follows the sinuous flow of the music, accompanying the unfolding of encounters, dynamics and emotions in a form well suited to the winding movement of memory and life itself. Yet precisely because of this meandering approach, the work sometimes loses its dramatic focus and coherence. Albisson and Marchand are two immense artists, but here they failed to ignite as a couple, lacking the essential spark needed to make this love burn. Meanwhile, the glittering life of the demi-monde is often portrayed in somewhat stereotypical terms, while Jürgen Rose’s costumes do not always reflect the refined sophistication that the Palais Garnier’s exemplary production standards have accustomed us to expect. Inevitably, one thinks of Sir Frederick Ashton’s “Marguerite and Armand,” created in 1963 for Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, and danced on this very stage by Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche in 2003. By comparison, Ashton’s romantic concentration and passionate distillation of the story are sorely missed. One can only hope that this jewel will one day be restored to this stage.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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