Drew McOnie’s “Nutcracker”
Tuff Nut Jazz Club, Southbank Centre, until January 6. southbankcentre.co.uk
London’s new “Nutcracker” is by Drew McOnie, a young director-choreographer who is already a theatre name. He used to dance with Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures; he was recently named as artistic director to the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. His “Nutcracker” is an alternative production in several ways: it’s to a chamber jazz revision of Tchaikovsky’s score by Cassie Kinoshi; it’s in a tiny space with the audience seated on three sides (the Tuff Nut Jazz Centre is round the back side of the Royal Festival Hall) and the four jazz-band players on the fourth; it’s to a gay-friendly revision of the narrative; it has just six dancers (three men, three women); it runs at just under one hour without an interval. What I most liked about it is that it has real sweetness and friendliness: it’s not one of those sexed-up, knowing, “Nutcrackers” that try too hard to subvert the polite, heteronormative world of tradition. Actually it shies away from the main darkness within “Nutcracker”, which isn’t to do with adult sexuality but (remember E.T.A.Hoffmann’s “Nutcracker” story) about aggressively invasive, even vengeful mice. A “Nutcracker” without mice and, in particular, a Mouse King is a “Nutcracker” without a nightmare that goes deeper than sexual repression.
Most of the nineteenth-century ballets are already subversive in their way: they say “There is another world”. Most of them are also fantasies of heterosexual adultery: Mr Right either is unhappy with his official fiancée or cannot settle for marriage in the society he knows. I’m inclined to be grateful “The Nutcracker” because it’s the exception to the rule: it’s really not about love.
The child heroine (daughter to a kind and protective couple) and her young Nutcracker companion make it to the realm of safety and sweets ruled by a Sugarplum Fairy, but the great pas de deux for the Sugarplum and her cavalier is not really a vision of romantic love or sexual fulfilment - it’s an emblem of chivalrous sublimity (but not sexual sublimation). The presiding figure of Act One was the magician Drosselmayer; the presiding figure of Act Two is the Sugarplum; the two never meet. In his 1984 essay “On Meaning in ‘Nutcracker’”, the musicologist Roland John Wiley observed that, before Tchaikovsky began work on Act Two, he heard that his beloved sister Sasha Davidova, herself a mother to children to whom he was a fond uncle, had died. The colossally descending scales of the Sugarplum adagio are, Wiley argues, to the metre of a crucial line in the Russian Orthodox device whose words say “And with the saints give rest”. That does much to explain the amazing musical drama of that adagio: on a very grand scale, it takes a tragic feeling and transforms it into a view of the ecstatic sublime. Yes, the Sugarplum has a consort, a cavalier, but the glory she embodies isn’t really about sex or sexual fulfilment, any more than the splendid public life of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip was a vision of romantic love.
For almost a century, however, many have disagreed with this idea of “Nutcracker”. The Soviet musicologist-composer Boris Asafiev argued that Tchaikovsky’s score was about the emergence of maturity and adult feeling in the child heroine Clara. (“Nutcracker is a symphony of childhood. Or rather of the time when childhood is at the turning point. When one is already excited with promises of youth, which is still a mystery, but the child’s habits and fears linger in the mind… When dreams carry thoughts and feelings forward, to the unpenetrated world – the anticipated life”.) In consequence, the Russian choreographer Vassily Vainonen - with Asafiev’s assistance - made a “Nutcracker” (1934) in which Clara (Masha in Russian productions), danced throughout by an adult ballerina, grew up to become herself the glorious figure who dances the Sugarplum pas de deux. Rudolf Nureyev, in his 1967 production (staged in 1968 for the Royal Ballet, and in 1976 my own first “Nutcracker”), added some Freudian spice to this recipe. Clara’s Nutcracker Prince was actually her vision of Drosselmayer, her godfather and her parents’ friend. He, Drosselmayer, became the hero who fought off the move on her behalf in Act One and, in Act Two, fought off a nightmare of her family.
Since then, there have been many alternative “Nutcrackers”. Most Russian ones are along Asafiev-Vainonen lines - sexual sublimation fantasy - which I find make “The Nutcracker” more rather than less like other standard ballets. (The subtlest version of this is the 2010 one by the Russian-Ukrainian-American choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, for American Ballet Theatre.) America - which has half the world’s annual “Nutcrackers”, most of them more or less traditional - has a number of “Butcracker” or “Nutcracker Rouge” views of sexy naughtiness. Mark Morris’s 1991 production “The Hard Nut” retold much of the original Hoffmann story in terms of 1960s America, working through to a Utopian vision of romantic love, principally between the heroine and Drosselmayer’s Nutcracker nephew. Matthew Bourne’s 1992 production, “Nutcracker!”, starts with a Dickensian view of a bad orphanage run by Dr and Mrs Dross; Clara discovers a dream of romantic joy with her Nutcracker male friend, another orphan, then sees it threatened by a nightmare of losing him to the Drosses’ daughter Sugar, only regaining his love (and escape from the orphanage) in the show’s final moments. I’ve changed my mind about both Morris’s and Bourne’s more than once: at times each of them seems to struggle against the music rather than fulfil it, but both tellingly combine comedy, dramatic seriousness, and musical wit. (I’d love to see again “Nutcracker in the Lower”, a heartfelt and racially diverse production set in modern New York with the child heroine’s mother working as a maid but reunited in her daughter’s dreams with her dead husband.)
Worse than any of these is Peter Wright’s Royal Ballet production, particularly as revised in 1999: it forces twee ideas of romantic bliss onto the child couple (played by adults), making them dance too much and intrude too much onto the action. Britain hasn’t had a traditional “Nutcracker” for decades: in a traditional one, Clara doesn’t dance on point, and neither she nor her Nutcracker friend dance at all after the opening party scene. The existential distance between those children and the Sweet adults is immense, and is meant to be.
I wonder what the gayest “Nutcracker” to date has been. Both Morris’s “The Hard Nut” and Bourne’s “Nutcracker!” are gay-friendly stories centred on male-female love-stories. McOnie goes further: his protagonist is Clive, a boy who plays at home with a Sugarplum doll but whose father imposes an Action Man doll on him instead. As life turns into fantasy - no mice, but lots of nice - Action Man and Sugar Plum both become young adult figures whom Clive befriends. Action Man (Amonik Melaco) is hunkily gorgeous but naive; it’s Clive who introduces him to new worlds of fancy dress and exotic behaviours - in the Snowflakes scene, dancers scatter paper snowflakes like confetti from champagne buckets - until finally Action Man agrees to don a ruffled skirt along the lines now worn by Clive and three other characters. You watch this narrative expecting Clive eventually to succeed on converting Action Man to gay fulfilment, but McOnie decides instead to make Action Man discover romantic love with Sugar Plum (to the big adagio), while gently and very simply explaining that he’s straight to Clive. When Clive at the end is found again at home, his father writes him - at least in fantasy - a Christmas letter explaining his pride in Clive and his own regret that he, Clive’s father, has been conventional and repressive.
McOnie’s storytelling is imperfect. I began by assuming that Clive’s father was actually his unpleasantly straight-acting sugar-daddy (we aren’t told what happened to Clive’s mother): I therefore assumed that the escapist Action Man fantasy was a dream of adultery on Clive’s part. We only understand the father’s conclusion when McOnie gives him spoken words. At the production’s initial press night, Clive was played by Mark Samaras (boyish, to judge by photographs); at its second press night on December 12, Clive was played by another dancer, very handsome but certainly adult: he very occasionally exaggerated when playing Clive’s more childlike side. As often happens in Bourne’s productions, the men are more three-dimensional than the women. Facial expressions - as so often in much British dance these days - are often bright, with enough fixed smiles from the women to create an impression of their being less real and less sincere than the men.
Another Bourne quality, enjoyable, is the amount of pelvic action in the dancing. McOnie gives his dancers full-bodied movement, with big jumps and leg extensions that are never inhibited by the small space; spines, torsos, shoulders, and arms are active, too. The pelvis, sometimes bumping, sometimes rippling, sometimes undulating in figure-of-eight patterns, stops these bodies from being divided into upper and lower halves; like the dancers’ rich épaulement, it adds a pleasant element of sensuality without becoming more sexually loaded than this story can handle.
There’s plenty of dancing here, but - as with Bourne - it’s a form of danced acting. There’s no point when dance itself - steps or other movement - becomes the primary point of interest. I’m inclined to attribute this to Kinoshi’s score, which has plenty of colour and surprise, but which lacks the highs, lows, and metric intricacy of Tchaikovsky’s original. Though Kinoshi’s musical revision is played in jazz terms, it’s remarkable how often Tchaikovsky’s own ballet score that features more syncopation, from the overture onward. Each McOnie dance feels like a different “Strictly” genre, though mercifully less flashy: his dancers, barefoot, have rhythmic footwork, but no moments when rhythmic subtlety or physical brilliance seize the eye and ear.
That’s anyway a British tendency: McOnie’s production has already won British admiration, and delights most of its British audience. I’m sorry not to have seen any of McOnie’s other work to date. He may well prove an inspired choice for Regent’s Park’s Open Air Theatre. Dance and theatre co-exist vividly within him; his is already a name, writ large in publicity for this staging. I find his “Nutcracker” too generalised in its movements; but I like his spirit.
Wednesday 13 December
@Alastair Macaulay 2023