The Nutcracker is ballet’s pantomime. Villains, heroines and magic. An audience full of festive cheer. Lots of little girls and boys in their party best on a family treat, grandmas and grandads in tow. A mood of high anticipation and enjoyment. Some of Tchaikovsky’s most beautiful and hummable tunes rising from the orchestra.
For the ballet companies, it’s a seasonal banker – a chance to ensure money in the coffers during increasingly hard times. It’s also an opportunity to involve young people on stage. School pupils take on the roles of naughty children at the opening party, as well as the battling rats/mice and toy soldiers who fill the scene as the action shifts from reality to fantasy.
Whether it’s actually the gateway ballet that people believe, I always doubt. My own first ballet was a triple bill of Les Sylphides, The Rake’s Progress and Pineapple Poll, one romantic, one dramatic, one comic: a full range of emotion communicated through dance. I wonder whether I’d have loved dance at all if I’d started with the unconvincing plot and embroidered variations of The Nutcracker.
Certainly, Wayne Eagling’s 2010 production for English National Ballet tries my patience. Peter Farmer’s designs are picturesque but cast in gloom by David Richardson’s crepuscular lighting, and Eagling’s solution to the assorted difficulties of the narrative is to turn the entire thing into Clara’s dream, and let the evil Mouse King pursue her from her home to the Kingdom of Sweets.
This runs counter to the story of the music – a mystical transformation from the first act to the second symbolised by the glorious growing Christmas tree – and also creates some true weirdness. Clara runs offstage as a little girl and emerges as an adult; the Nutcracker Prince keeps changing back and forth from handsome prince to ugly doll and is actually two people. Or maybe I missed something.
On the plus side, there’s skating, a hot-air balloon, a DayGlo tree and wonderful, committed dancing from the entire company, who invest the national dances of the second act with pace and feeling, and the whirling snowflakes with icy precision. In the performance I saw, James Streeter’s Drosselmeyer held everything together with bothered-uncle gentleness, while Erina Takahashi was warm and lyrical as Clara. The woman behind me sang along as the dancer went through her variations.
Over at the Royal Ballet, things are a lot rosier thanks to designer Julia Trevelyan Oman, who creates for the first act a perfect Victorian drawing room and turns the fantastical kingdom of the second into a glistening palace of cream, pink and gold. Peter Wright’s 1984 production, performed for the 559th time on the night I went, is durable, traditional and full of glitter (often from the pockets of Gary Avis’s Drosselmeyer).
Clara here is an onlooker to all the enchantment, watching in wide-eyed wonder as a new world opens up around her. Sae Maeda imbues her with an airy poetry, a child on the verge of adulthood, her movement wonderfully free. Francesca Hayward was a radiant Sugar Plum Fairy, though her technique looked less secure than it sometimes does. Alexander Campbell an attentive prince. As at the Coliseum, company and orchestra work their hearts out to give everyone a lovely time.
Star ratings (out of five)
Nutcracker (English National Ballet) ★★★
The Nutcracker (Royal Ballet) ★★★★
Nutcracker is at the Coliseum, London, until 7 January 2024
The Nutcracker is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 13 January 2024
