Every time Swan Lake is subjected to a new interpretation, its hero, Siegfried, seems to acquire another affliction - depression, a drug habit, repressed homosexuality, an Oedipus complex. In David Nixon's new version for the Northern Ballet Theatre, he has become a complete emotional train wreck.
Renamed Anthony and relocated to affluent New England circa 1910, he is guardedly in love with his best friend, Simon, but trying to do the acceptable thing by marrying his neighbour, Odilia. Unfortunately for this doomed love triangle, Anthony has been obsessed from childhood by a fantastical Swan Woman (Odette), a fixation triggered by his encounter with a dead swan.
Now, about this dead swan. Twice in the ballet Anthony lovingly hauls its feathered carcass from the reeds, and twice a discreet shudder ripples through the audience. Ballet is good at prettying up death, but nothing can stop us imagining the bloating, stink and slime that would realistically accompany such a moment. What Nixon thought when he hit on a bird's corpse for a romantic symbol is hard to imagine - but it is the first in a series of grim miscalculations.
The next is the ballet's excessive burden of protagonists: with three lovers and a bird competing for Anthony's heart, it is impossible to focus our sympathy on any one of them. Odette may be broken-hearted after Anthony marries Odilia, but to us she is just one in a parade of victims.
Just as incoherent as the storyline is Nixon's pick-and-mix approach to the music and choreography. Most of the dancing is newly created to fit the plot, yet Nixon often dips back into the Petipa Ivanov text, creating a jarring mess of 19th- and 21st-century conventions. To service this he inserts extracts from other Tchaikovsky scores into the music, compounding dramatic confusion with musical vandalism.
This is all a shame, because Nixon's idea of pursuing a dysfunctional rather than a glamorous concept of romanticism has interesting possibilities, and in Jonathan Ollivier he has a dancer tailor-made for the job. Ollivier generates a field of nervous static that is both sexy and scary, and his acting, like that of the majority of NBT's strong, appealing cast, is intelligently nuanced. There really is the core of a decent ballet here. It's just that Nixon, as muddled as his own hero, can't see it straight.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0113-222 6222. Then touring.
