Nutcracker is ballet’s annual sugar rush – a gulp of delicious dance and Tchaikovsky’s music. Hitting the literal sweet spot between trashy and smugly tasteful can prove tricky, but English National Ballet’s new production – fun, cohesive and astoundingly pretty – delivers Quality Street levels of moreish pleasure.
It’s a collaboration between Aaron S Watkin, ENB’s artistic director, and rising star choreographer Arielle Smith. Given their previous, you’d guess that she led on storytelling and he on the classical set pieces, but they create a harmonious whole.
We open in Edwardian London: tumbling chimney sweeps, suffragettes, a Fagin-like cheesemonger with a swarm of sticky-fingered urchins. It’s giving Mary Poppins, with a dollop of Oliver.
Away from the streetlife, the bougie Stahlbaum family holds a Christmas party. Afterwards, little Clara creeps downstairs and dreams: of a battle with the mice, a flight through the snow with a prince to the land of sweet delight.
Productions of Nutcracker can struggle to locate a workable plot – ENB’s last version was barely coherent – but these magical characters reflect Clara’s waking world. Mama becomes the gracious Sugar Plum Fairy, auntie the Ice Queen, granny leads the liquorice allsorts. It makes perfect sense.
One of the show’s few misjudgements is nudging the toymaker Drosselmeyer from uncanny to positively creepy – Junor Souza gives him way too much feline vim. And you might wince at the privileged tots, arms loaded with gifts and cheeks stuffed with treats. It’s hardly a Nutcracker for our cost-of-living crisis.
Still, there are grace notes to relish. I enjoyed the jaunty servants, the mice making off with cheese and pickles, and the volatile Rat King (James Streeter) with his fisticuff paws. Dream Clara is played by an adult dancer (Ivana Bueno), a projection of her girlboss future: she skewers the Rat King, shoves aside his henchmice and rescues her Nutcracker prince (Francesco Gabriele Frola, throwing off a dauntless series of spins).
The production’s star may be designer Dick Bird (enhanced by Leo Flint’s video), who creates an elegant cityscape and a delicious shimmer into fantasy. His breathtaking land of ice is fringed by icicles beneath a silver bauble moon. Clara flies away on a sleigh drawn by an ice-carved seahorse. In the land of sweets and delights, with its views of plum-pink turrets and candyfloss clouds, each treat gets its own neat pavilion.
The directors rethink the national dances that form this act’s traditional vibe of sugar and racism. Goodbye thigh-slapping Russians and throwback orientalism; hello dances inspired by swirling Ukrainian buns (led by Erik Woolhouse’s hurtling leaps), milky Egyptian sahlab (beguiling Minju Kang) and Spanish nougat, with Emily Suzuki’s almond-crisp turns and fudgy descents. The act is crowned by Emma Hawes’ Sugar Plum, her footwork like delicate piping-bag tracery across the floor. Time stands still when she appears.
ENB will hope that they’ve made a show that they can bring out for years to come – there’s truly heaps to sink your teeth into.
London Coliseum, to January 12; ballet.org.uk
