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Photo: Simon Annand The choreographer sets Act I not in the cosy home of a well-to-do bourgeois family, but in a grim orphanage. The original magician and maker of the nutcracker doll, Dr Drosselmeyer, becomes truly sinister Dr Dross, who runs the orphanage with his equally tyrannical wife.
We start off identifying with Clara, the teenage heroine she's called Masha in Russia , only to see her reduced to the status of a spectator for the second half of the ballet. When Matthew Bourne approached the piece in , a century after that St Petersburg premiere, he identified another problem. That for most present-day audiences, the wealthy 19th-century household in which the first act is set was itself a fantasy, greatly reducing the potential impact of the dreamland. So he reworked the story, positioning it in a grim, Dickensian orphanage.
This works wonderfully well. The juvenile inmates are all played by adults, and their quirks are expressed in the magnified body language of which Bourne is a master.
Everyone is sexually and emotionally repressed, and Dr Dross Daniel Wright and his wife Madelaine Brennan , who run the institution, are tyrants. They're parents to the oleaginous Fritz Dominic North on splendidly excessive form and Sugar, danced with tooth-melting pertness by Ashley Shaw, while Clara Hannah Vassallo, who recently played Baby in Dirty Dancing is a soulful-eyed dreamer, given to drifty moves in an Isadora Duncan shift.
Dross, flavoured by Wright with sadistic and possibly paedophile tendencies, is a particularly vile figure, and there is a pathetic scene where the children ooh and aah over a miserable twig of a Christmas tree, and unwrap second-hand gifts, which are swiftly snatched back. These include the Nutcracker, a ventriloquist's dummy whose creepiness is suddenly and horribly apparent when, in the person of Chris Trenfield, he comes to human-sized life.
Cue the spectacular transformation of Anthony Ward's set. Shedding his plastic hair and fixed grin, the Nutcracker is revealed as the orphanage boy Clara has long fancied. Our aim has always been to take a fresh look at every aspect of Nutcracker!
As each new generation of dancers take on these wonderful roles, we always find new ideas and new things to inspire us.
News Matthew talks about Nutcracker 2 April Why does it remain so popular? Why has it become such an important part of the New Adventures repertory? In most classical productions the piece begins at a very heavily populated and extremely wealthy Christmas party.
An enormous Christmas tree usually acts as the centrepiece and many luxurious gifts are given. Your production begins in a very bleak Dickensian orphanage where the children are experiencing a very different kind of Christmas. Why did you choose to do this? What was the inspiration for this? I believe that you created some new characters for these dances?
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