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A London Christmas
by Jane Simpson
Over year end, Londoners have had a choice of two Nutcrackers, two Cinderellas, and Ashton’s lovely La fille mal Gardée, revived by the Royal Ballet after far too long. The Nutcrackers are very different in look and feel: Birmingham RB's is probably the best traditional version ever seen in this country, and had some excellent performances by young casts, some - like Chi Cao, Nao Sakuma and Lei Zhao - with enormous promise. English National Ballet's has a modern dress first act, designed to please world weary 11 year-olds who think mobile phones on stage sophisticated, and who may proudly pick up some of the Freudian overtones of Drosselmeyer's relationship with Clara, especially as danced by company director Derek Deane. Best of the first night cast was the ever elegant and stylish Thomas Edur.
There's an even greater contrast between the two Cinderellas. The RB's is Ashton's 50 year old classic, complete with Ugly Sisters danced by men - not very well these days - and lots of traditional transformations and so on, as well as some gorgeous choreography. I saw Sarah Wildor's debut, full of individual touches and her own beautifully musical dancing, handsomely partnered by Michael Nunn, in one of his last roles before leaving the company to join Kumakawa's new enterprise. ENB, meanwhile, has Michael Corder's version, created for them in 1996 and now also in the repertoire of the Boston Ballet - who sent Patrick Armand and Larissa Ponomarenko to dance the first night. Corder's choreography is fluent and shows the company off well, and he goes to great length to make his ballet quite different from Ashton's, which he knew well in his dancing days with the RB. Unfortunately, for my taste, he's gone too far and thrown out too much along with the broad comedy - there seems too little incident for a full evening, and there's not enough contrast in the different dances to hold the attention and stop us thinking of what would be happening in the Ashton. And however sound the reasoning may be, I feel really cheated when Cinderella's tutu doesn't turn back into rags when midnight strikes!
When it came to Fille, though, all was joy - well, more or less. Six casts of lovers produced - reportedly, I only saw half of them - about four generally considered successful; the character roles had a rather lower hit rate and included two or three real disasters. Most surprising success was Jonathan Howells, not hitherto famous for anything in particular, who produced a characterisation of the simple-minded Alain to provide hot competition for any previous casts. Carlos Acosta had his first full-length role as the dashing Colas, and gained superb reviews - he's a real acquisition; Miyako Yoshida was probably the overall favourite as Lise. The company's most Ashtonesque dancers, Bruce Sansom and Sarah Wildor, got extra performances due to exits and injuries - of the four they gave, three were apparently goodish and one - miraculously, the one I was at! - was on another plane altogether and will be my standard of comparison for years to come. They look perfectly in tune with the choreography, the story and each other, and Wildor found an emotional depth in Lise I have simply never seen before, from anyone, to lift the ballet from a charming boy-gets-girl story into everyone's love story. I can't tell you what joy it gives to see this lovely ballet, with the whole company looking again like a cohesive whole, and lit by central performances of such rightness which seem to grow out of the ensemble rather than being imposed on it from outside. There is hope for the Royal Ballet yet!