There is a ballerina on the billiards table in the Little Library, perfectly poised on its very edge. She is so still it is like looking at a painting, or a film photograph. Suddenly, she breaks into a grin and exclaims, ‘This is like having a set! Multiple sets!’ before suggesting she tries knocking balls into holes with her perfectly pointed toes.
Of course, Lauren Cuthbertson isn’t just any ballerina. She is one of the defining dancers of her generation, having spent more than two decades at the Royal Ballet where she is a principal guest artist. She has danced leading roles in all the great classical ballets, including Odette/Odile in Swan Lake and the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker. She has also performed in countless works by Sir Kenneth MacMillan and Sir Frederick Ashton, as well as creating new ballets like Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
She is here at Eastnor as an artist in residence, invited to respond to the space in whatever way feels right to her. She has, so far, bourréed and pirouetted around the Octagon Room and Gothic Drawing Room, and will, imminently, dance an excerpt from The Nutcracker in the Long Library. It is fascinating to see her interact with the castle like it is a theatre set, choosing movements that work with its architecture and interiors – at one point, she even picks a particular step because of the shape of a curtain.
‘I was struck by how at home I felt dancing around there in my pointe shoes,’ says Lauren. ‘It's authentic and layered in a way that makes you feel comfortable, but it's also incredibly inspiring in terms of scale and decoration, and those things are so tangible. It felt easy for my artistic self to weave among the tapestry of the castle.’
As one of the Royal Ballet’s star performers, Lauren has danced on some truly incredible stages – the Royal Opera House, of course, one of them. But she also describes dancing in St Paul’s Cathedral as a standout, as well as a recent performance in the V&A where she found herself, mid-lift, eye-to-eye with a Raphael Cartoon. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that she was quick to recognise Eastnor’s theatrical potential.
‘I do spend quite a lot of my “theatre” life in theatres,’ she says, reflecting on how she felt when first arriving at Eastnor. ‘So I felt a sort of synergy because [Eastnor is] quite theatrical. It was interesting for me because it could almost be a set somewhere. The scale of it is something you don’t come across very often. It feels like a very special space.’
But Lauren’s relationship with place goes deeper than finding an interesting backdrop. As a ballerina, she usually dances a character – Aurora, Odette, Alice, Virginia Woolf – and tells me how she tries to connect deeply with each role. Her favourite performances as those in which ‘you just feel so attuned to the character that you can be completely yourself as someone else.’
Playing Virginia Woolf (incidentally, the great niece of former Eastnor resident Virgina Somers) particularly moved Lauren. ‘Imagining her world became something that I was quite compelled to imagine and chase,’ she says. She describes how, as well as reading Woolf’s work, she set out to visit the real places that Woolf lived and wrote, from Russell Square to Charleston, to feel closer to the woman she was portraying on stage.
‘I feel like being in a space where you know that person has existed and lived does bring [the character] to life in a much more tangible way,’ she says. ‘I'm so attuned to my emotions, and choreography and acting and drama. But that realm of real life makes it feel even more impactful and less dramatic because it feels more real.’
There is an interesting inversion of that process at Eastnor. Here, Lauren isn’t performing a character or inhabiting somebody else’s world. Instead, we see Lauren herself – a ballerina responding to music and an artist reacting to the castle’s different spaces, fully immersed in finding movements that feel right in that particular moment, in that particular room.
And after spending the day treating Eastnor as a succession of stages, what ballet could she imagine being set here?
‘A ballet thriller,’ she says. ‘A history-drama ballet thriller. Miss Marple in the Billiards Room. I can imagine it already.’
Her next onstage performance, however, will be Manon, the dramatic but deeply romantic ballet by Kenneth MacMillan, which runs at the Royal Opera House until 25 November. One of the most-loved dances in Manon is “Bedroom”, where Manon and Des Grieux share a passionate pas de deux in the latter’s apartment, its set dominated by a four-poster bed.
‘Manon is one of my favourite ballets by Sir Kenneth MacMillan,’ says Lauren, before adding: ‘and actually, the wonderful four-poster bed isn’t that dissimilar to [those at] Eastnor Castle.’
Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon runs at the Royal Ballet and Opera until 25 November 2026; rbo.org.uk