During the mouse battle these same characters can be seen taking up comfortable viewing positions in the newly enlarged dolls’ house, appalled and thrilled by the carnage like tourists at the Battle of Waterloo. The Spanish, Arabian, Chinese and Russian dancers are first glimpsed as fancy-dress attendants on St Nicholas, dispensing sweets for the children at the Stahlbaum’s party. Every feature of the enchanted second half is now presaged in the real world of the first. Some of the subtler innovations are fun to spot. Wright’s integrating of Clara and her beau into the national dances of Act II makes for a near-perfect balance, rendering the whole thing vastly more palatable for children, and adding depth and texture all round.
The usual gripe about Nutcracker being an uneven game of two halves – the first all story and no dancing, the second all dancing and no story – no longer applies. The Royal has stayed loyal to Wright’s production since 1984 and, since a recent overhaul, it is now definitive. Some ballet companies change their staging of the Christmas classic as a family might change its car: English National Ballet has had 10 versions in 65 years and frankly could do with a new one. It helps, too, to have an ace house orchestra when the score is as good as Tchaikovsky’s. A global relay on the first night without so much as an edit button.īut then, these dancers are in their comfort zone in this particular show, which exploits all the things the Royal is best at: naturalistic drama combined with a coolly restrained classicism, and a sense (however carefully manufactured) of being grandly at ease in a stage world that gaily includes expanding furniture and battalions of mice on its way to one of the most heart-stopping grand pas de deux in the canon.
0 kommentar(er)
