WIDE-EYED WONDER In praise of
the innocent joys of The Nutcracker
It is our first trip to The Nutcracker together. My daughter Sybilla is wearing the navy velvet dress she calls ‘my midnight blue’, and carries her toy meerkat. Her small body tenses as the house lights go down. She copies those around her and claps the conductor, but goes a little further and waves at him as well. I worry about how this is going to turn out. Perhaps she is too young? But then the music begins and Tchaikovsky sweeps us both away, on waves of enchantment, into a magical production in which flowers dance and toys come to life. A topsy-turvy, enchanted world where, somehow, my little daughter and I are equals.
Let me step back for a moment to share a confidence: until recently, I didn’t see the point of The Nutcracker. Yes, it has the most sumptuous, familiar tunes in all of ballet, but to me that was a reason not to see it. I was a grownup. I thought I needed to be challenged. I didn’t go to the opera for anything so bourgeois as pleasure; I went to experience atonality, minimalism and a spectacle of emotional wreckage. In Berg’s Lulu I found the requisite levels of depravity, or as critics would say, sophistication. When I went as a guest in 2010 to The Nutcracker, sitting in the stalls with a glorious view of the Sugar Plum Fairy, I secretly ranked her as only one up from the revolving ballerina doll on top of a child’s music box.
Then I became a parent, which is nature’s revenge on the culturally ambitious, and went back to the beginning, swapping Proust for Postman Pat. I began to yearn for the traditional, the splendid – even the heartwarming. I longed to share with my daughter the music I had loved in my own childhood, Handel’s Messiah, the Carnival of the Animals, and The Nutcracker, kept alive by the Royal Ballet in its most classic form and performed in time-honoured costume. For I particularly wanted to take her to a rendition that played it absolutely straight, neither emulating the hectic irony of Pixar, nor putting a disturbing, modern twist on an old classic, like a gritty Hansel and Gretel I had once seen in which Gretel performed a Nazi salute after kicking the witch into the oven. At the Royal Opera House, a spell is cast over the auditorium as Peter Wright’s exquisite production, designed by the late Julia Trevelyan Oman, rises to the joyful aplomb of the music. Clara falls asleep and the fantastical dream logic of the piece takes over, the Christmas tree grows to enormous size, soldier mice with gleaming red eyes storm the stage, and Clara’s Nutcracker carries her away into the Land of Sweets. ‘Again!’ my daughter cries as the curtain sweeps down.
After the obligatory interval ice-cream, the Sugar Plum Fairy seems a hallucination, consumed by Sybilla with saucer eyes. Where Disney crassly turns up the volume, Tchaikovsky does the opposite, drawing us in with the hushed delicacy of spun sugar. My daughter speaks of Clara as a friend for weeks afterwards. ‘Clara’s brother broke her Nutcracker!’ she tells us, outraged, at bedtime. She does not seem to have noticed that Clara was played by a young woman, so clever is the illusion created in the opening Christmas Eve party scene, where there are real children, dancing with utter concentration, their commitment caught and returned by those in the audience. The Nutcracker isn’t just a pabulum for children that adults tolerate; it is an unalloyed joy for both. My daughter made me see it anew, her delight washing away my cynicism. Childhood – a second one, experienced with your own offspring, nephew, niece or small friend – is made afresh by this evergreen piece; and childhood, after all, is what Christmas is all about.
‘The Nutcracker’ is at the Royal Opera House (www.roh.org.uk) until 12 January 2017. For more ‘Nutcracker’ inspiration, visit Liberty to see its Christmas collaboration with the Royal Ballet.