Nutcracking
Frank Johnson
rr his Christmas and New Year at Covent
Garden, the Royal Ballet is mounting a new production of the Nutcracker. Lon- don Festival Ballet is again performing the ballet at the Festival Hall. The Scottish Ballet is doing it at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow. At any Christmas, it is estimated that 50 Nutcrackers can be sighted across the United States, although nobody can ever have done a definitive count and so the toll could be even higher.
These American Nutcrackers range from those of the two great American com- panies, the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre, to semi-amateur performances at which almost as many parents and children connected with the cast are on stage as in the audience. In the Soviet Union, Nutcrackers for the workers go on all the year round as eventually, according to the State ideology, will Christ- mas. As with all SoViet statistics, no one knows the true figures for Soviet Nutcrack- er production. At the Wimbledon Theatre this year, the Vienna Festival Ballet is dancing the Nutcracker. This sounds like one of those scratch troupes, less familiar today than a few decades ago, with cunningly-devised titles of alluring foreign- ness, such as the pre-war Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Someone involved, how- ever, has a cloth ear. Vienna and its festival are famous for opera rather than ballet. But people are not necessarily to know that in Wimbledon.
So, from the farthest reaches of one superpower to the most distant shores of the other, we have this great chain of children united with one another via Wimbledon, and in the darkness of scores of theatres the same tale unfolds. It sounds a nightmare.
In particular, the little girls will take a lot of punishment. How many ice lollies will be tipped by horrible little boys down the unwary backs of new party frocks, or pigtails be torn from their roots? How many marriages of accompanying adults will undergo renewed strain as tickets are lost, children lost, taxis unfound? As we ballet-goers know well, ballet is not pri- marily for children. The Nutcracker is really for adults trying to look at a fairy story through the eyes of idealised chil- dren: with the same wonder, usually de- scribed as `wide-eyed', which children nowadays hardly ever show in the theatre — only in front of violent television car- toons, or possibly Dynasty. Certainly, many children will be entranced by Nut- crackers world-wide this Christmas. For:: some it will be the start of a life-long love of ballet. For many more, it will looked back on as one more of childhood's ordeals. The adults, however, are another matter. At which point, non-ballet-going adults might care to know what the Nut- cracker is. The first confusion to resolve is that The Nutcracker Suite is the title of the selection from Tchaikovsky's score for the ballet, not the title of the ballet.
Next it should be explained that the story derives from E. T. A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker and the Mouseking. In act one, at a Christmas party in a drawing room somewhere in the bosom of an idealised, early-19th-century, high-bourgeois Ger- many, the little girl Clara receives the present of a wooden nutcracker fashioned as a soldier. It is given by Drosselmeyer, an old man who seems to hire himself out as magician around the town. After midnight, Clara sneeks down again to the Christmas tree, where she is attacked by a horde of killer mice led by their king. But the Nutcracker comes to life as a handsome youth and leads all available soldiers in the defeat of the mice. The humanised Nut- cracker leads Clara through a snowstorm to the Kingdom of Sweets, where they are greeted by the Sugar Plum Fairy — she whose music, in which Tchaikovsky in- corporated a new instrument from Paris called the celeste, has been danced by innumerable, hilariously unfunny British television comedians wearing ballet skirts. The Kingdom puts on a lengthy ballet festival for Clara the climax of which is the grand pas de deux for the Sugar Plum Fairy and her cavalier. Everyone dances in a final ensemble. The End.
Several things may strike the newcomer about this story as a ballet — above all, its incompetence. Clara has the longest role, but is not the ballerina — indeed, does not have to be able to dance. The ballerina is the Sugar Plum Fairy, who only has the grand pas de deux to dance, and that is the end. That means that her partner — her cavalier — has even less to do. For both, it is a light evening's work. Consequently, all modern productions have tended to merge the roles of Clara and the Sugar Plum Fairy — making the Fairy the child dream at being the ballerina or making the ballerina the 'wish-fulfillment' of the child — and
'Help, I've been destablised.'
merge the roles of the nutcracker-soldier and the cavalier.
Non ballet-goers, particularly opera- goers, may inquire: how does this affect the original? To which the perhaps surpris- ing answer is: there is no original. No one can remember how the remarkably few works traditionally regarded as ballet's classics (Giselle, Coppelia, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and the Nutcracker) were originally danced. Unlike today, the nota- tion of dance was not in an advanced state. And the Tchaikovsky ones were not fully performed in the West before the first world war. After the revolution, various Russians, claiming to have the 'texts', helped staged the classics for the new companies emerging as ballet became popular in the West. But we do not know how accurate they were. From the 1950s, the Soviet Union's Bolshoi and Kirov companies presented the Tchaikovsky clas- sics in the West. The choreography was not a bit like ours. One theory is that ours are now closer to the originals. Another theory is that all is chaos. Only Tchaikovsky's scores are much the same from one pro- duction to another. The first Nutcracker (St Petersburg, 1892) was choreographed by Ivanov, the original choreographer, with Petipa, of Swan Lake. Nothing sur- vives of his work, though in some produc- tions the grand pas de deux is attributed to him. Translated into operatic terms, it is as if, say, La Traviata was played all over the world with the same music, but with varying vocal lines on top, and always to a differing story.
All this means that choreographers may do what they like, and do so. In Covent Garden's last Nutcracker, which was choreographed by Nureyev, not only did Clara become the ballerina, but it was the elderly magician, Drosselmayer, not the toy Nutcracker, who turned into the prince of her dream — both magician and prince being danced by Nureyev. He is said to have thought this very Freudian, Repres- sed adolescent desires etc, when in fact it was very silly. Adolescent girls can seldom desire elderly gentlemen with limps and eye-patches. Cranko's choreography, for the Stuttgart Ballet, included a dance for males with blacked-up faces which sur- vived only one performance in that form when the company appeared in New York• The faces had to be whitened in deference to anti-racist feeling. It is to be hoped that America's powerful anti-cholesterol lobby will not force the abolition of the Kingdom of Sweets.. Festival Ballet's production, choreographed by Ronald Hynd, has a rude party guest in act one, called Count Ratstein, who later becomes leader of the rats. This is the most unstimulating innova- tion in all my years of Nutcracker-going. Hynd's production replaced my owl') favourite: that choreographed by Lichine for Festival Ballet in the 1950s to sets and costumes of the great Benois. I used to watch it 'wide-eyed' when I first discovered ballet, which was rather embarrassing since I was already about 18 at the time.
Previous page
