The Nutcracker – London Coliseum

Choreography: Aaron S. Watkin and Arielle Smith

To celebrate its 75^th birthday, English National Ballet has decided to reinvent a classic, a brand-new version of The Nutcracker, a dance filled with Christmas Eve magic about toys and sweets coming to life and dancing in the dreams of a young girl. Relocated to Edwardian London and given a preamble that shows toymaker Drosselmeyer (Ken Saruhashi) creating the nutcracker doll, Aaron S. Watkin and Arielle Smith’s reworking is full of detailed storytelling but given a new level of beauty in Dick Bird’s enchanting set design.

Most versions of The Nutcracker open in Clara’s living room as her parents prepare for a Christmas Eve house party, at which she is given a nutcracker doll, and you know the rest. But Watkin and Smith take the audience back a few steps with a handful of short scenes played behind a gauzy curtain in which Clara and her mother visit the toy and sweet maker’s shop and see the nutcracker doll for the first time on the counter, a moment highlighted by Paul Pyant who throws the surrounding scenario into shadow and lights for this fateful encounter.

Quickly, the action transfers to a Mary Poppins-like street scene, overlooked by St Paul’s Cathedral, with characters and activities buzzing across the stage, including urchins and their leader sporting what look like rats’ tails, and even some Suffragettes. Later at the party, as naughty children get into a variety of scrapes, adult guests are dressed in echoes of their future costumes where they become characters in the Land of Sweets and Delights, and it is this attention to detail that makes strong connections across Watkin and Smith’s show, drawing together the influences and encounters that actively shape Clara’s dreams later in the story.

Bird’s work is first-rate, everything you want from this ballet and then some, but managed with swift physical transitions that are a credit to the Coliseum’s stage management and technical teams. The layering of places, from the toy workshop to the sweet emporium, the living room of Clara’s large home and into the Christmas tree and toy castle for the battle between the nutcracker and the rats, are the work of moments, seamless scene changes that only enhance the magical journey that Clara undertakes. It builds nicely to the most classical of Act I finales in the white and silver realm of the Ice Queen and her snowflakes filled with icicles, where a seahorse-driven sledge takes Clara and her nutcracker prince to Act II.

Here, the famous musical pieces are envisaged as different types of sweets from around the world, and Bird’s costumes take in a range of influences that match Watkin and Smith’s choreography influenced by dance styles from the paso doble for Spanish turron to a sultry trio representing Middle Eastern delicacy salhab and the light flurrying steps of the delicate buttercream roses. Best of all, the show’s most famous pairing, the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier, beautifully performed by Sangeun Lee and Gareth Haw, who embrace the captivating moments of stillness and slower rhythms of the choreography to produce a very special finale presentation.

This new production has some minor imperfections: the connection between Katja Khaniukova’s Clara and Miguel Angel Maidana’s Nutcracker Prince occasionally feels a little heavy, the odd lift not quite timed, and there is a questionable bit of video-game animation during the journey from the Ice Realm, but very little can dim the Christmas lights on Watkin and Smith’s vision and the festive dream world they bring to life.

Runs until 12 January 2025