Instead of the circus, Peter Wright ran away to join the ballet. At 16, he was a student at Bedales boarding school in Hampshire, but was desperate to train to be a dancer, something his disapproving father had no truck with. Wright and a friend absconded to chase their dreams. Their great escape ended in a police cell after they slept in a field for two nights, but the breakout was enough to show Wright’s father just how serious he was about wanting to dance: within the year he was apprenticed to the choreographer Kurt Jooss and at the beginning of an illustrious career.
Now 98, he has been a dancer, company director and choreographer, and there are few people who have seen the ins and outs of British ballet up close for as long as Sir Peter has, and who are still playing a part in it. His productions of the major ballet classics – Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, Coppélia – are still regularly staged around the world, especially his Nutcracker, which Birmingham Royal Ballet, the company he established in 1990, is dancing this Christmas.
But Wright was never much fussed about those famous 19th-century ballets. “The classics generally, I mean, most of them were rubbish,” he says when we meet at BRB’s HQ. The stories often didn’t make much sense, he explains, the mime would be half-hearted, there wasn’t enough motivation behind the dancing. When Wright was asked to stage his own versions of these ballets, that’s what he tried to rectify, often with great success, by injecting some narrative thrust alongside the beautifully ordered formations and sparkling pas de deux.
The Nutcracker, though a perennially popular ballet, with its Christmas setting and gloriously tuneful Tchaikovsky score, has always been a bit disjointed in the narrative department. Wright’s show is based on the Marius Petipa/Lev Ivanov original from 1892, retaining much of Ivanov’s choreography, with additional material by Vincent Redmon as well as Wright’s own steps. It is more about sumptuous colour and costumes, escapist fantasy and a giant expanding Christmas tree than anything else, but he elevates the role of Drosselmeyer the magician and highlights heroine Clara’s journey from childhood to the awakenings of first love. He makes it easy to get swept up in the show’s enchanted world. It was Wright’s gift to the city of Birmingham when BRB launched, and many ballet fans still think it’s the best Nutcracker on offer in the UK.
A few years ago, Wright might have been leading rehearsals. Now he comes in occasionally. The dancers want to have their photo taken with the man whose portrait hangs on the walls here. He still has a line in gently scathing asides. “John Cranko had just done a production of Swan Lake – not terribly good in my eyes,” he might say. Or: “I was asked to do a production of Sleeping Beauty in Cologne, which was very tiresome, actually.”
His 2016 autobiography, Wrights and Wrongs, is full of gossipy behind-the-scenes titbits: how Rudolf Nureyev refused a costume that didn’t show his bum, or how Carlos Acosta hated the one that did show his. From Wright’s early days with Ballets Jooss and the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, to becoming ballet master at Stuttgart Ballet (led by Cranko), associate director to Kenneth MacMillan at the Royal Ballet and then artistic director of Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, which later moved to Birmingham and became BRB, he has seen it all.
When I ask about the dancers Wright has most loved watching over the years, he can’t help but drift back to Margot Fonteyn. He was a huge fan, although he says, surprisingly: “I remember when I first started, she was cold as ice. But the way she developed, the passion she had, especially working with Rudolf. The chemistry was just right somehow.” Wright would sometimes teach Fonteyn and Nureyev. “Rudi was a bit of a pain,” he says of the notoriously badly behaved dancer. “But I did like him.” He speaks admiringly of how the famed partners “liked to be pushed”, never resting on their reputations.
Wright was always an exacting director, and valued disciplined dancers who were constantly striving. “I sometimes think it’s almost too comfortable now,” he says. For greatness, you need a bit of risk, a bit of grit, in Wright’s eyes. He certainly had it, fighting with his accountant father over his choice of career. “He was appalled at the idea that I should be a ballet dancer,” says Wright, but he adds, “The fact that I did have to fight to do it is what made me.”
Why was he so determined to pursue dance? “When I decided I wanted to be a dancer I hadn’t seen a ballet,” says Wright. “I’d seen pictures.” At Bedales there was a selection of ballet books in the library. “I found biographies of dancers fascinating, and quite appalling some of them, what they used to get up to!” he giggles. During the school holidays in 1943, his mother took him to see the International Ballet. “It was Les Sylphides,” Wright remembers. “There was [the role of] the Poet, with all his lovely ladies around him, and I said to my mum: ‘That’s what I want to do!’” Be surrounded by lovely ladies? “Oh yes,” he smiles. “But I wanted to be surrounded by dancers. The lovely lighting, the beautiful music. Music and dance: ecstasy.” Wright is in a reverie, and I get the impression he can still picture that stage vividly. “Looking back on it, I don’t think it was a particularly good performance,” he adds. But it was enough to convince him.
Wright had a dream to be a star principal dancer, and it didn’t come true. He started too late, he says. “My body, my feet, everything was too set. And however hard I worked – and I did work very hard – I ended up having a few principal roles but I wasn’t a top principal, which I wanted to be very badly.” Yet it’s possible he has had a much longer, more interesting career because he didn’t get exactly what he wanted, and was nudged into other arenas: teaching, directing, choreography, even a stint directing dance for the BBC in the late 1950s and 1960s.
When we meet, Wright has come to Birmingham with his daughter Poppy (his wife, the dancer Sonya Hana, died in 2007) to see BRB dancing Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal Gardée. The Birmingham company is now run by Cuban superstar Carlos Acosta. Does he think Acosta is doing a good job? “Well, judging on last night, and also Sleeping Beauty [which toured in the spring] …” he starts, making positive noises, then interrupts himself. “I’m guessing, I think he found it quite difficult at the beginning,” says Wright. “And I always thought that for the first three years, a director should be there all the time, and he hasn’t been there all the time” – Acosta also runs his own company in Havana, Acosta Danza, and the Acosta Dance Centre in London. “But looking at the standard, it is working,” says Wright.
One ballet Wright would like to see revived is Jooss’s The Green Table, which he danced back in that first tour with Ballets Jooss during the second world war, when he had to share a bed with the company stage manager because there weren’t enough rooms, so many of the regular digs having been bombed. As a depiction of the horrors and futility of war, The Green Table was an especially significant ballet back then. But it still is now. “It’s an anti-war ballet. It is absolutely as relevant as ever,” says Wright. “I hope it is going to come back again. I have a feeling that Carlos has his eye on it.”
For all that Wright may think a bit of precarity is good for an artist’s drive, he is concerned about the drastic cuts to arts funding that the City of Birmingham has had to enact. It was a huge undertaking bringing the London-based Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet here 34 years ago and embedding the company in the city; he is not about to watch that hard work be undone. “I attacked the lady mayoress last night,” he chuckles. “Well, I didn’t attack her, I said I’m very disturbed that they may lose their funding. And she was rather on the defensive.” Wright is still ready to argue for his art form. “Ballet must not end in Birmingham,” he says firmly.
Wright puts his own longevity down to spending his years deeply involved in something he loves. “Even though it can be very frustrating,” he says wryly, always ready with a critical aside. What is it that ballet has given him that’s so special? “It’s given me my life,” he says simply. “Dance has given me my life.”
• The Nutcracker is at Birmingham Hippodrome until 14 December
