Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, March 2012

In the world of dreams real people can take on strange identities, and so it is here. It all starts at tea in a large garden, where Alice’s mother ejects her daughter’s beloved Jack, the gardener’s son.

Alice, all images Johan Persson

To distract the disappointed Alice, Lewis Carroll conjures up a large hole in the ground and disappears down it, growing a bunny tail and long ears. He has become the white rabbit, encouraging Alice to follow him down the hole. We see a video projection as she floats down, landing up in front of an array of doors. Shrinking and growing she tries to squeeze through a small door, and suddenly the auditorium fills with colourful performers, bright confetti raining down on them from the dome above. The effects are wonderful, and while Lewis Carroll has become the white rabbit, Alice’s father and mother turn into the King and Queen of Hearts, with Jack as the Knave, accused of stealing the tarts, and appearing in court. But was it Jack, or was it the vicar, who becomes the March Hare? Other people from the garden party appear too: the magician who arrives to entertain them becomes the Mad Hatter, and the Rajah who arrives with his retinue becomes the Caterpillar.

In an entirely different development, this revival has converted the two acts of the world premiere a year ago — see my review at the time — into three acts, a welcome change.

Steven McRae as the Mad Hatter

On opening night this time around, Lauren Cuthbertson repeated her wonderful performance of Alice, and Federico Bonelli did well in the role of Jack, taking over from Sergei Polunin who has vanished from the scene. Once again Edward Watson was very fine as Lewis Carroll and the White Rabbit, and Eric Underwood was a super Caterpiller. Laura Morera was a strong Queen of Hearts, but Philip Mosley lacked stage presence as the Duchess, particularly compared to Simon Russell Beale last year. As for the Mad Hatter, Steven McRae was superb again, his tap dancing utterly brilliant.

Joby Talbot’s music, conducted again by Barry Wordsworth, provides just the right atmosphere, giving a hot summery feel to the garden party in Act I, and I like the allusions to the Rose Adagio in Sleeping Beauty, and the clock scene in Cinderella. Bob Crowley’s designs are glorious, beautifully lit by Natasha Katz, and the scenario by Nicholas Wright brings Lewis Carroll’s story very cleverly to the ballet stage. The dream becomes real, but in the end Alice falls back into the real world, returning to the garden party with Jack, and the dream seems to have done the trick.

Performances continue until April 16 — for details click here.

Rattigan’s Nijinsky, Chichester Festival Theatre, August 2011

Malcom Sinclair as Rattigan, all photos Manuel Harlan

This is not just a play for ballet fans or anyone who has heard of Diaghilev or Nijinsky, it’s also for Rattigan fans, as Terence Rattigan himself appears on stage, brilliantly played by Malcolm Sinclair. He interacts with the characters in his own drama, particularly Diaghilev, and at the end of Part I we hear the following dialogue between them. Diaghilev: Where are we now?  Rattigan: Thursday, May 29^th, 1913, the first night of The Rite of Spring.

This famous premiere gave the Paris audience two creations that many found hard to take: Nijinsky’s revolutionary choreography, and Stravinsky’s extraordinary score. The theatre was in an uproar and police had to be called to keep some sort of order, while Nijinsky was backstage shouting out counts to dancers who could barely hear the orchestra for all the noise. It remains the most riotous premiere in all of ballet.

Jonathan Hyde as Diaghilev

We know of course who Stravinsky was, Diaghilev too, but who exactly was Nijinsky? This play shows him as a boy applying to the Czar’s Imperial Ballet School. He’s small and was almost rejected out of hand, but his jumps were amazing, and he was the first person to do an entrechat dix. Not a six — “Any carthorse can do a six“, says Diaghilev — but a dix (a jump where the feet are interchanged in the air, with beats, five times). But technical virtuosity aside, Nijinsky was a creative genius whose first ballet, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune to Debussy’s music of the same name was a sensation of sensuality.

In this brilliant new play by Nicholas Wright, based on a screenplay by Rattigan, we see some of the original steps for Faun, along with Rite of Spring and Petrushka. And there’s music too: snatches of these ballets and Firebird. It’s all immensely watchable.

Nijinsky had an extraordinary instinct for dance. He was the first male dancer to take a solo bow, and he talks excitedly about how a woman threw a diamond tiara to him, and he tossed it back. So what went wrong? Rattigan endeavours to tell us. He talks to his mother who recalls seeing Nijinsky in Petrushka, “He lollopped … like a puppet”. “He is a puppet”. But Mrs. Rattigan is non-plussed, and when her son tells her Nijinsky was sacked, her response “Russians are so emotional”, shows she doesn’t really get it, and she wonders why her son has never found the right woman to marry.

This is the key. It’s why Rattigan refused to allow the BBC to put on the play they’d commissioned. He received a visit from Nijinsky’s widow, Romola who knew perfectly well that her husband was bisexual, but threatened Rattigan that if he brought to light the relationship between Nijinsky and Diaghilev then she would out him as “a pervert and a man of bestial proclivities”. He couldn’t bear to be recognised as homosexual because it would overshadow his work, so he backed off. In this play we see how Nijinsky was manipulated, not least by Romola herself. She schemes to make him her husband, and later takes him to see the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who diagnoses schizophrenia, a term he coined himself.

Faye Castelow as Romola and Joseph Drake as Nijinsky

There is also underhand scheming by others, including Diaghilev, brilliantly portrayed by Jonathan Hyde, who also played Rattigan’s BBC producer Cedric Messina. In body, Hyde looked more like the real life Massine than Diaghilev, but that is a minor point — his characterisation was excellent, and we are left wondering whether Diaghilev really wanted to rid himself of Nijinsky. Joseph Drake was wonderful as this extraordinary almost other-worldly dancer who believed it was God who helped him perform. Drake also played Donald the young hotel worker who fancies Rattigan. He was immensely likeable in both roles, a contrast to Faye Castelow was eminently dislikeable as his wife, the young Romola, with Susan Tracy equally dislikeable as the widow, as well as doubling up as Rattigan’s charmingly superficial mother. Lovely portrayal of the choreography by Emma Harris and Ellie Robertson.

This is not just worth seeing — it’s a must see for anyone with the slightest interest in ballet, and the creative team led by director Philip Franks and designer Mike Britton have done a wonderful job.

Performances continue until September 3 — for details click here.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, February 2011

When the performers came on at the end, even the trees took a bow. It was that sort of evening, when the whole cast did a superb job, and the audience loved them all. And why not indeed? This was the world premiere of a brand new full-length ballet choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to specially commissioned music by Joby Talbot, and the audience roared their approval.

Lauren Cuthbertson as Alice and Sergei Polunin as Jack, photos by Johan Persson

Lewis Carroll’s original story is a wonderfully unusual and creative tale, hard to put on stage as a ballet because it’s impossible to reproduce Carroll’s clever word play. But this ballet matched its creativity, and the music matched the choreography. The scenario by Nicholas Wright was very effective, the lighting design by Natasha Katz was magical, and the video projections were glorious. I loved the fluttering leaves towards the end, and the tumble down the rabbit hole early in Act I gave me a sudden sense of vertigo.

Alice trapped by being too large

But what of the dancing? Lauren Cuthbertson was a remarkable Alice — how on earth did she keep going in Act I when she’s on stage virtually all the time? Amazing! Sergei Polunin was a star as her beloved Jack, the gardener’s son, and as his alter ego the Knave of Hearts. Steven McRae was fantastic as the Mad Hatter — his tap dancing was brilliant, and I loved his costume in pink and green. In fact the costumes and designs by Bob Crowley were a delight. I liked the nineteenth century outfits at the start, as if we were in A Month in the Country, followed by modern clothes at the end. That might seem odd, since Alice is simply waking from a dream and the costumes should be the same when she awakes, but somehow it worked. And in between — in Wonderland — the costumes were immensely colourful.

Zenaida Yanowsky as the Queen of Hearts

So many vignettes from the original story were included, one cannot mention them all, but Simon Russell Beale as the Duchess in the ‘Pig and Pepper’ chapter was a revelation. I had no idea he was so musical. Eric Underwood was a wonderful caterpillar, and Edward Watson was very fine in his two roles, as Lewis Carroll and the White Rabbit. But if one had to pick one performer, apart from Lauren Cuthbertson, it was Zenaida Yanowsky as the Queen of Hearts. She was also the mother in the ‘prologue’, ejecting Alice’s beloved Jack from the garden party because she thought he stole a tart — then in Wonderland she becomes the imperious Queen of Hearts. Her spoof on the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty was worth the whole show, and Yanowsky played it with superb comic timing.

In case it sounds as if I was overwhelmed with appreciation, here are a couple of quibbles. I thought Act I had moments where things didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and the choreography was dull, though Act II carried on at a frenetic pace. And while Joby Talbot’s music suited the choreography very well, with wonderful uses of the percussion section, and Barry Wordsworth got the orchestra to play it eloquently, I felt a lack of tension. But these are relatively minor quibbles, and if we compare this new full-length ballet to the new full-length opera Anna Nicole that premiered from the Royal Opera House less than two weeks ago, the ballet is far more creative.

See it during its first run if you can, though I’m sure it will be revived in a year or two’s time. This is a co-production with the National Ballet of Canada, whose first performance in Toronto is on June 4. Performances by the Royal Ballet continue until March 15 — for more details click here.