Farewell, Sir Anthony

There will be champagne, there will be ovations, and there will undoubtedly be tears. Tonight, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, the British ballet Establishment honours its best-loved and most distinguished son, Sir Anthony Dowell, who retires at the end of the current season.

The celebrations will be spectacular - tickets to the fund-raising gala cost up to £1,000 - and guests will fly in from all over the world to celebrate Dowell's 40-year career with the Royal Ballet. The first 25 of those years were spent as a dancer, the last 15 as artistic director, a post he will have held longer than anyone, apart from the company's founder, the late Ninette de Valois. "It's such a tremendous family dynasty," he tells me. "I've been here long enough now to see children go all the way up the ladder."

Dowell's career spans the Royal Ballet's golden years. In the 1960s and Seventies, his dancing won him worldwide adulation, and his partnership with Antoinette Sibley was rivalled in its empathy and intensity only by that of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. As artistic director, Dowell has lived

through some of the company's most challenging days, seen himself and his dancers evicted from the Opera House by the builders, and been on the receiving end of biting personal criticism. All of this he has survived, however, and with the dancers newly ensconced in their purpose-built studios, he leaves the company on a roll. Artistically speaking, the present season excels - or at the very least equals - any within memory.

With Dowell's departure, the Royal Ballet will be headed by an outsider for the first time in its history: Ross Stretton, formerly of the Australian Ballet. "I'm breaking the bloodline," Dowell admits. "Terms of change are always unsettling and a lot of people are not going to like it." His apprehension is part-professional, part-personal. "I've lived with this decision for two years now, and as it's got nearer it's become a countdown. There were problems, but ... well, whatever it was, you knew you were alive!"

Anthony Dowell, now 58, was born in Wimbledon and started ballet classes at the Royal Ballet School at the age of 10. At 18, he was invited to join the company, where his unforced elegance and immaculate technique swiftly brought him to public attention. "I was blessed," he admits of his extraordinary gifts. "And to begin with, it felt easy."

AMONG male dancers, this level of virtuosity was something new. Nureyev arrived from Russia as an established star in the same year that Dowell joined the Royal Ballet, but, for all his charisma, Nureyev had a much less biddable physique than the self-deprecating Dowell. Perfectly proportioned and possessed of a dazzling tensile pliancy, Dowell was the choreographer's ideal instrument. "My great thing was never to show effort," he says, "to make it look as if it was all the most natural thing in the world."

Dowell and Nureyev raised the stakes, and with them the demands made on male dancers. In 1964, Frederick Ashton choreographed The Dream, creating the lead roles of Oberon and Titania for Dowell and Sibley. "Dream was a real killer," remembers Dowell. "There's not just the scherzo but the very long pas de deux afterwards. You hit burn-out halfway through and go on to automatic pilot. I'd get really nervous about it before performances because I knew how awful I'd be feeling halfway through, and not be able to show it." Audiences, as Dowell intended, knew nothing of this. Instead, they were amazed by his fluent technique and unearthly glamour.

DOWELL'S repertoire was vast. For Ashton, he created roles in The Dream, Enigma Variations and A Month in the Country; for Kenneth MacMillan, Manon, Winter Dreams and others. "It was the most wonderful time," he remembers. "It was all such a collaborative affair." His most exacting role, however, came in 1986 when he succeeded Norman Morrice as the Royal Ballet's fifth artistic director. After a happy but sheltered childhood and star-status adulthood (he lived with his parents until his thirties), Dowell was unprepared for confrontation. "That upbringing didn't harden the skin," he admits ruefully.

He was criticised for the designs of his Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, and in the early days doubts were expressed about his capacity for hard-core administration. "In an argument, my natural thing is to avoid, to walk round," Dowell concedes. "But in this job I've had to face the dragon. There have been a lot of nasties and God, has it taken it out of me. But you have to grab that nettle - for example ending people's careers. I've done it all, and hated it, and now after 15 years, I want a life without these sorts of pressures."

He will be remembered with real love by the company. He has been an assiduous guardian of its heritage, keeping at bay a tide of balletic eurokitsch that a less discriminating director might have succumbed to. Yet he has always encouraged his dancers towards self-discovery. "I've been slagged off - 'Oh, he's letting the Ashton style go' - but you can't freeze things. I know what Fred wanted and try to keep that alive, but when it comes to individuals they've got to find their own way." As undoubtedly they will.

Meanwhile, there are glasses to be raised, and a golden career to be celebrated.

The Royal Ballet's summer season, A Celebration of Anthony Dowell, runs 23 July-4 August. Tel: 020 7304 4000.