The Royal Ballet

Experience the quintessential Romantic ballet in Peter Wright’s atmospheric and bewitching production.

The world turns upside down for the peasant girl Giselle when she discovers her lover Albrecht is actually a nobleman promised to another. In despair, she kills herself. Her spirit joins the Wilis, the vengeful ghosts of women who have been jilted and die before their wedding day. The Wilis are hell-bent on killing any man who crosses their path in a dance to the death. Wracked with guilt, Albrecht visits Giselle’s grave, where he must face the Wilis – and Giselle’s ghost. Will he survive?

The supernatural power of Giselle makes it one of the best balletic examples of the 19th-century Romantic genre. The plot’s themes of love, betrayal and redemption were inspired by Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne and Victor Hugo’s poem Fantômes. The spectral beauty of the ballet is at its height during the Dance of the Wilis in Act II, where the Wilis gather around Giselle’s grave – also a moment of technical brilliance for the Company’s corps de ballet. Since its first performance in Paris in 1841, Giselle continues to captivate audiences worldwide.