When Natalia Osipova started rehearsals for her first ever play, it didn’t go well. I’m stressed and completely lost on the first day,” she reports. The Royal Ballet principal plays a Russian ballerina from a previous age: Lydia Lopokova, who danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, then in 1925 unexpectedly married British economist John Maynard Keynes, who is the protagonist of James Graham’s The Standard of Living – a play about, among other things, taking risks and imagining a brave new future.
Acting is central to ballet’s appeal for Osipova. Even so, she demurred when former colleague Edward Watson suggested she audition. Osipova requested a translator in our previous interviews, but today speaks in an idiosyncratic gallop not unlike Lopokova’s own.
Entering Nicholas Hytner’s rehearsal room, joining a classy cast led by Rory Kinnear, she felt like Lydia among Keynes’s sneery Bloomsbury friends. She drafted in her husband, dancer Jason Kittelberger, to run through lines at midnight. It’s my life.” But gradually, she found that the fundamental goal in theatre was the same.
With your partner, you start to play. You listen, you reply, and this is like life.” Graham is also in rehearsal, continually adjusting the script. His play is attentive to Lydia’s physicality: dance solos mark the scene changes, while a frequent stage direction for Lydia is “she stomps”.
Osipova delights in making him laugh – they have just rehearsed Lydia’s first entrance, swearing fearsomely in Russian – and she feels kinship with her character. Lopokova, says Osipova, “is not famous and popular in Russia” – her choreographer brother, Fedor Lopukhov, is better remembered. Each altered key parts of their identities: Maynard as a man who slept with men (keeping meticulous records of his encounters), Lydia as a feted dancer.
She describes Keynes as “a man like a mountain, to hug her and give her everything. She for him and he for her.” Keynes’s Bloomsbury chums were less appreciative. In the play, she is called “that flat-footed, frivolous foghorn of a chorus girl!” Osipova grimaces.
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