Kenneth MacMillan’s Anastasia is one of several full-length dramas he created on his return to the Royal Ballet in 1971, after directing the Deutsche Oper Ballet in Berlin. It is a hybrid work, incorporating as its third act a famous one-act Anastasia that MacMillan created in Berlin in 1967. A shy man who suffered debilitating stage fright, MacMillan was an outsider by nature. His empathy for such characters as Romeo and Juliet, and the poet Des Grieux and Manon, delivered some of the most glorious love duets of his career. He was attracted, too, to the story of Anna Anderson, a mentally ill woman who believed herself to be the Romanov Grand Duchess Anastasia, the only member of Tsar Nicholas’s family rumoured to have survived their assassination by Bolshevik operatives in July 1918.