It’s Nutcracker season again, and on last Monday’s opening night the Royal Ballet demonstrated that in Peter Wright’s production, created in 1984 but substantially reworked since that date, they have a work of rare and enduring magic. The Royal’s relationship with the classical canon has been ambivalent in recent years, with The Sleeping Beauty looking especially neglected, but their curation of The Nutcracker has been unimpeachable, and the ballet is in every sense a delight. There’s Tchaikovsky’s beautiful score, wonderful dances by Wright based on Lev Ivanov’s original choreography, and the enchantment of the 19th-century Nuremberg setting (designs are by Julia Trevelyan Oman).
In the townhouse where the Stahlbaums are entertaining, all is firelit warmth. Adults watch as children tear open their presents. There are party games, a conjuring show, and angels fashioned from gingerbread and marzipan. It’s a dream of Christmas past. As the magician Drosselmeyer, a role he has played for many seasons now, Gary Avis has achieved national treasure status, and Anna Rose O’Sullivan is vivid and bright-eyed as Clara, the teenager whose transformative dream-journey the ballet describes. Her Nutcracker, as charming as the day is long, is the spring-heeled Marcelino Sambé. The corps whirl and swirl as snowflakes, the divertissements are dashed off with elan – Fumi Kaneko inscribing lovely lines in the air as the Rose Fairy – and the grand pas de deux is rendered with flawless grandeur by Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov.
Trevelyan Oman’s designs reproduce those of the Biedermeier era, the years of peace and prosperity in central Europe that followed the Napoleonic wars and the 1815 Congress of Vienna. It was in this early Victorian period, when the gaze of the middle classes turned from politics to the ordered pleasures of family life, that ETA Hoffmann’s original Nutcracker story was set. Given its bourgeois preoccupations, it’s tempting to view the Biedermeyer era as idyllic, but waiting in the wings of this particular idyll are the figures of the poor. For every Clara opening her presents beneath the Christmas tree, there’s a Little Match Girl freezing to death in the street outside.
There’s a melancholy strain in Tchaikovsky’s score that seems to recognise this shadow aspect, and in his 1992 version of The Nutcracker, set in an orphanage, Matthew Bourne responds with characteristic insight. The privilege of the few, he shows us, is always dependent on the exploitation of the many, and this knowledge enables us to view the Royal Ballet’s production in a more equivocal light. In the nooks and crannies of the Stahlbaums’ house live the mice, a near-invisible population surviving on the scraps from the family table. Decimated by traps, suppressed by the establishment’s tin soldiers, the mice suffer defeat when Clara, impelled in equal parts by girl power and class assertiveness, thwacks their king (Nicol Edmonds) on the head with her pointe shoe.
Much as I love the Royal’s Nutcracker, I’m always a little saddened by this outcome. I much prefer the mice, with their cutlasses and whiskery swagger, to the repressive, rifle-toting soldiers. I live in hope that maybe, one day, the mice will win. What adventures might Clara have then?
• The Nutcracker is in rep at the Royal Opera House, London, until 15 January
