Seventy years ago today, the Russians took Covent Garden.
Not with tanks.
With ballet shoes.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
And today we’re going to the ballet.
But this isn’t just ballet.
This is ballet with the Cold War breathing down its neck.
October 3rd, 1956.
Exactly seventy years ago today.
Three score years and ten.
The Royal Opera House.
Covent Garden.
And something extraordinary is about to happen.
For the first time, the Bolshoi Ballet is appearing in London.
The Bolshoi.
Good word, that.
Russian.
Bolshoi simply means “big”.
Or “great”.
So the Bolshoi Theatre is, quite literally, the Great Theatre.
And nothing about what happened in London that autumn was going to be small.
The dancers were big.
The reputations were big.
The expectations were enormous.
And the politics?
Bigger still.
Remember where we are.
The Cold War is cold.
Very cold.
East and West stare at one another.
The Soviet Union on one side.
Britain and America on the other.
The Iron Curtain has divided Europe.
Stalin has been dead just three years.
Khrushchev has begun denouncing him.
There’s talk of a thaw.
Perhaps East and West can get along a little better.
Perhaps.
And into that uncertain atmosphere comes Moscow’s great cultural treasure.
The Bolshoi Ballet.
London went mad for it.
People began queueing for tickets three days before the box office opened.
Three days.
Imagine that.
Sleeping outside for ballet tickets.
No clicking “Book Now”.
No refreshing the screen.
You wanted to see the Bolshoi?
Get your coat.
Take a sandwich.
Join the queue.
And wait. The Guardian
There had even been a bizarre little diplomatic wobble before they arrived.
A Soviet discus thrower was accused of stealing five hats from an Oxford Street shop.
Five hats.
Not one.
Five.
Diplomats became involved.
For a moment there were fears the whole visit might be jeopardised.
The crisis passed.
The hats did not stop the ballet. The Guardian
And so, October 3rd.
Opening night.
Covent Garden.
Romeo and Juliet.
Prokofiev.
And dancing Juliet is one of the most celebrated dancers who ever lived.
Galina Ulanova.
She’s 46.
Think about that.
Not some 19-year-old prodigy.
Forty-six.
And she is about to convince a packed London theatre that she is Shakespeare’s teenage Juliet.
That is artistry.
Ulanova had made the role one of the great performances of her career.
And when London finally saw her in it, the effect was extraordinary.
Margot Fonteyn herself was among those who were overwhelmed.
London knew ballet.
This was not some provincial audience seeing world-class dancing for the first time.
Britain had Fonteyn.
It had Sadler’s Wells.
It had a serious ballet culture.
And still Ulanova came through the doors at Covent Garden and knocked them sideways. The Guardian
Picture the house.
Red velvet.
Gold.
Chandeliers.
Programmes rustling.
People looking round to see who else is there.
That electric murmur before a great performance.
The orchestra tuning.
Somebody coughing.
Someone squeezing along a row apologising.
Opera glasses coming out.
And then…
The lights go down.
The talking stops.
The curtain rises.
And Moscow has arrived in London.
The great thing about the Bolshoi style was scale.
Power.
Drama.
Athleticism.
This wasn’t dainty little porcelain ballet.
The men seemed to stay in the air.
The women covered space.
The corps moved like a great organism.
Big jumps.
Big emotion.
Big theatre.
Even the name was telling you what to expect.
Bolshoi.
Big.
And London loved it.
Later writers would describe that first visit as a cultural feeding frenzy.
The dancers were followed around London.
There was fascination with them.
Who were these people?
What were Soviet citizens really like?
What did they eat?
What did they wear?
How did they behave?
Remember, ordinary travel between Britain and the Soviet Union was nothing like it is today.
These people had come from behind the Iron Curtain.
And suddenly they were here.
At Covent Garden.
Walking London streets.
Eating London food.
Looking in London shop windows.
Dancing Shakespeare.
And that is where this gets interesting.
Because governments can send artists abroad for one reason.
Audiences can receive them for another.
The Soviet state might see discipline.
Prestige.
National achievement.
The superiority of Soviet training.
London sees Juliet.
A girl falling in love.
That’s the trouble with art.
It has a habit of slipping its leash.
You can send out a cultural ambassador.
The audience may simply fall in love with the human being.
And Ulanova was apparently almost uncanny in that respect.
The technique disappeared.
You forgot you were watching technique.
She didn’t seem to demonstrate Juliet.
She became Juliet.
There’s a lovely description of her movement from the period.
The sense that she flowed into and out of the dancing almost as naturally as a bird flies or a fish swims. The Guardian
That’s the highest compliment you can pay a dancer, surely.
You stop seeing the work.
You see the life.
And now I want to freeze the frame.
October 3rd.
Because there’s something almost eerie about the date.
London is applauding the Bolshoi.
There are curtain calls.
Flowers.
Cheers.
People pouring out into Covent Garden afterwards talking about Ulanova.
Wonderful.
Extraordinary.
Did you see that?
And now move the calendar forward.
Twenty days.
October 23rd.
Budapest.
Students take to the streets.
Demonstrations grow.
Crowds demand political change.
The great statue of Stalin is pulled down.
The Hungarian uprising has begun.
Within days Soviet armour is involved.
And in early November Soviet forces move in overwhelmingly to crush the revolt.
Thousands will die.
Many thousands more will flee Hungary.
So while London is still talking about Ulanova…
the Cold War is about to stop dancing.
That’s the extraordinary backdrop to this visit.
Onstage, Romeo and Juliet.
Outside, East and West.
Love and violence.
Beauty and power.
And history closing in.
And 1956 wasn’t finished with Britain either.
Before October was out, Britain and France would become embroiled in the Suez Crisis.
What a month.
You could almost hear the old post-war world cracking.
Empires.
Superpowers.
Tanks.
Canals.
Revolutions.
And meanwhile, at Covent Garden…
a woman in ballet shoes runs across a stage.
There’s something rather wonderful about that.
History tends to come to us in headlines.
Hungary.
Suez.
Cold War.
Soviet Union.
Big nouns.
But life is lived in small rooms.
A theatre seat.
A programme on your knee.
A woman dancing.
A man leaning forward because he cannot quite believe what he’s seeing.
And the Bolshoi visit mattered.
It changed the way British audiences thought about Russian ballet.
That great muscular, dramatic Russian tradition suddenly wasn’t something one merely read about.
It was there.
Live.
Twenty yards away.
You could hear the shoes hit the stage.
You could hear the orchestra.
You could watch Ulanova breathe.
And London’s love affair with the great Russian companies had begun.
The Bolshoi would return.
The rival Kirov would come.
And in 1961 the Cold War and ballet would collide spectacularly when Rudolf Nureyev defected in Paris.
But that’s another story.
Today belongs to October 3rd, 1956.
Covent Garden.
Opening night.
Seventy years ago today.
And maybe that’s the picture to leave with.
Outside, an autumn London night.
Taxis drawing up.
Covent Garden market still very much a working fruit and vegetable market in those days.
Porters.
Crates.
Cabbages.
Flowers.
The smells of the market.
And through those streets come people in evening dress.
Into the opera house.
Into the red and gold.
The house lights fall.
The orchestra begins Prokofiev.
The curtain rises.
And London sees Galina Ulanova.
For the first time.
The Russians have arrived.
Not tanks.
Not missiles.
Not manifestos.
Music.
Movement.
Romeo.
Juliet.
And one unforgettable ballerina.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
And today’s word of the day?
Has to be Bolshoi.
Большой.
Big.
Great.
Grand.
And on October 3rd, 1956, at Covent Garden…
it was all three.