There are a lot of good reasons not to stage ballet in a church, even one as magnificent as St Paul’s Cathedral.

Ballet is a picture that needs the frame of a proscenium arch. It also needs a raked stage, wings and a pit. St Paul’s offers none of these essentials we normally thump desks for but we
waved it away last night as it was the last time Thomas Edur and Agnes Oaks danced in the UK.

The pair are retiring from English National Ballet where they’ve dazzled for 20 years. The husband-and-wife team are heading home to Estonia — he’s to be artistic director of Estonia’s national troupe, and she’s to help him and have a family. Apparently, she’s already pregnant (you read it here first).

I don’t know if Les Sylphides has previously been danced by a pregnant lady but Oaks did and looked, well, radiant. Edur was all nobility as the Poet, and also did a respectable choreographic job in his new piece for three couples. Truth to tell, it was a bit angsty but a good parting shot.

Most find it hard to believe he and Oaks are really going, so refined they still look, so true to ballet in all its heart-breaking rigour. Why don’t they have honorary OBEs? Why don’t ENB barricade Buckingham Palace until they get them?

Also on the programme was The Dying Swan, mercifully without the loathsome ruffle designed by Karl Lagerfeld (a man who knows nothing about ballet), and an orchestral playing of Maxwell Davies’ An Orkney Wedding — presumably a tribute to sweethearts Edur and Oaks.