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Seeing The Nutcracker, which is currently being staged by The English National Ballet at The Liverpool Empire, is a bit like going to Midnight Mass: you go because it’s Christmas.
There’s something so reassuringly festive about it that even the unconverted to ballet go – to be brushed with some of the magic of the season, to see Christmas through child’s eyes again, to experience a nostalgia for a Christmas Past that exists mostly in Dickens’ novels.
And The English National Ballet’s production, choreographed by Wayne Eagling and showing at Liverpool’s Empire until 3rd December, is the perfect vehicle for doing so, with its consciously traditional approach, firmly setting the story in the last years of the Nineteenth Century.
It’s Christmas Eve and Clara’s family is throwing a party. An old family friend, Dr. Drosselmeyer, arrives with his nephew, bearing gifts. Clara is given a Nutcracker doll. Her brother Freddie plays a prank involving a clockwork mouse. After the excitement of the party, Clara falls into a dream-laden sleep where elements of the evening’s events are spun into her nightmares: her Nutcracker is attacked by an evil Mouse King who pursues the pair of them through a glittering snowscape until Dr. Drosselmeyer arrives in a hot-air balloon to rescue them.
Upon the Mouse King’s eventual defeat, there are great celebrations, dancers from around the world perform set pieces and Clara meets the toothsome Sugar Plum Fairy. Finally, she awakes back in her bedroom to discover it has all been a dream.
Peter Farmer’s fabulous set unfolds layer by layer like a Faberge egg, or a Russian doll, exhibiting first a frozen London complete with ice skaters, now a drawing-room rich with colour and festivity, then a snowy scene of sparkling snowflakes.
The underlying menace of Clara’s dream, and we are talking giant rodents here, is emphasised by David Richardson’s sinister kaleidoscopic swirls of shadow that play across the floor, lending the atmosphere a disorientating nightmarish quality.
Usually the dream device allows for some preposterous plot development but, in this case, the only preposterous thing that happens is that the plot is entirely abandoned in favour of more ballet. This makes it essentially an experience of two halves. The first half is playful, humorous and follows a narrative; the second is a showcase of dances. These “divertissements” are visually pleasing, with dancers interleaving like so many pieces of choreographed confetti or undulating like snakes across the stage to Arabian Nights woodwind, or capering like Cossacks, or Swarovski-encrusted snowflakes executing, for want of a better phrase (and I’m sure there is one), a Mexican Wave.
Tchaikovsky saves his flights of lyrical passion for the second half and there’s one point after the interval where, musically, it’s almost Swan Lake all over again. But as diverting as all this is, it’s the tiny vignettes of narrative detail in the first half that I like.
How, around the edges of the developing plot, we see snippets of stories half untold: doddery dowagers and cantankerous codgers raising their walking sticks in anger to be soothed with a top-up; mischievous scamps marauding through the party on their hobby horses; three suitors fighting over one girl. And, what strikes me here, is what great actors these dancers are! I particularly enjoyed Seamus McIntosh who plays the child Freddie, whilst Daniel Kraus’ Mouse King skulked beautifully.
So, personally, I preferred the first half. But then I’m the type who only goes to church for Midnight Mass so, for the uninitiated like me, this polished, sparkling production is near perfect.
The English National Ballet: The Nutcracker
The Liverpool Empire Theatre
Composer: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
November 29 – December 3 2016
Running time – 2 hrs, 15 mins
PR Rating: **** Magical