[1] On the last night of the company's summer season in 1973, MacMillan left a copy of Prévost's novel in Antoinette Sibley's dressing room, with a note informing her that it would "come in handy for March 7, '74".
As the copy of Manon Lescaut was in a double volume with the novella Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, Sibley asked Anthony Dowell to find out which story was to be turned into a ballet, while she performed onstage in The Sleeping Beauty.
He left the title character open to differing dancer interpretations, but was himself sympathetic to her poverty, believing that it was her desire to escape this that underpinned her decisions.
[1] MacMillan used the designs of Nicholas Georgiadis, which reflected the "precarious division between opulence and degradation" with "the stench of poverty ever-present".
[3] The ballet's narrative structure is based on that of MacMillan's earlier Romeo and Juliet, with hero and heroine meeting each other as young innocents and their love being revealed through a series of pas de deux.
The Guardian newspaper stated, "Basically, Manon is a slut and Des Grieux is a fool and they move in the most unsavoury company", while the Morning Star described the ballet as "an appalling waste of the lovely Antoinette Sibley, who is reduced to a nasty little diamond digger".
Among them are des Grieux, a young student, the wealthy Monsieur GM, and Lescaut, who is there to meet his sister Manon on her way to enter a convent.
MacMillan chose not to use music from Massenet's opera Manon, instead selecting other well-known pieces by the same composer such as Elegie and Méditation.