English National Ballet’s Christmas season is the first London outing for the company since star ballerina Tamara Rojo took over as artistic director. In terms of being a showcase for the new regime, however, it’s a red herring.
Rojo has promised to bring in progressive new work but she’ll still have to programme bums-on-seats shows such as The Nutcracker. This one was created by Rojo’s predecessor Wayne Eagling and it’s an elegant, if muted, production, with Edwardian-inspired designs by Peter Farmer in a palette of sepia, burnished bronze and gunmetal grey.
The challenge is how to unite the two halves of the story and make Clara’s trip to dreamland more than a series of disparate dance numbers. Eagling has thought it through and aimed for a more graceful arc, keeping the battle with the Mouse King as a running thread and dispensing with a Sugar Plum Fairy to allow the grown-up Clara to dance the grand pas de deux with her Nutcracker Prince.
There are parts where the energy flags, though, and it might be because Eagling doesn’t harness his greatest asset, Tchaikovsky’s score, mismatching moments of musical and choreographic drama.
In the show I saw, bright young thing Nancy Osbaldeston stood out in some of the solo roles, but the cast is ever changing throughout the run, and Rojo herself takes up the lead as Clara for four shows (tomorrow, December 20, 22 and 29).
She’ll dance it like a pro, of course, but for once it’s what she might do off-stage rather than on — when she really gets her teeth into this company — that’s going to be more exciting.
Until January 5 (020 7845 9300, eno.org)
