Royal Opera House, LondonWayne McGregor’s take on the novelist’s complex tale is ambitious, beautiful and, though wanting in some parts, redeemed by incredible performancesIt makes complete sense that Wayne McGregor would be attracted to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, the story of a scientist who engineers a perfect race of people. McGregor’s own choreography so often seems an attempt to transcend the limitations of the body, embracing technology, streamlining the messiness of fallible humans. To stage Atwood’s complex world is a colossal challenge, but McGregor revels in a big vision. He has made a ballet that’s epic, ambitious, flawed, in parts inspired, in others wanting, often beautiful and not for a moment boring. MaddAddam was premiered by National Ballet of Canada in 2022 to mixed reviews, and it has had some tweaks for this European premiere by the Royal Ballet, including a voiceover by Tilda Swinton (McGregor’s never less than high-end when it comes to collaborators), which goes some way to quelling narrative confusion. McGregor (with dramaturg Uzma Hameed) is never interested in just rehashing a story across three acts. The source material is a prompt, a proposition to bounce off, although there’s plenty of Atwood’s prescient books (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam) in here. The first act finds Snowman, AKA Jimmy (Joseph Sissens) up a tree, after a global pandemic-