No Sugar Plums in Champfleury
In September Moscow’s Novaya Opera brought its February premiere to Istanbul: The Nutcracker. Not a Fairy Tale, for which one is duly grateful. It was, I suspect, an act of some daring. The Turkish public is used to Russian ballet arriving in the form of touring companies with Swan Lake in a suitcase, and here instead was an experiment. Nor was the choice of work a safe one. The Nutcracker has long been Russian ballet’s calling card, and in Türkiye it is practically public property: the State Opera and Ballet gives it every New Year, and tickets vanish with the speed of a cake at a vicarage tea.
The house, too, must have struck the company as a stern examiner. At home they dance in a cosy theatre of some six hundred seats in Moscow’s Hermitage Garden; here it was the Atatürk Cultural Centre on Taksim Square, which holds two thousand. Compatriots were present in force, of course, but for once they did not outnumber everyone else. The majority of the audience was Turkish.
Not all of that majority, I fancy, knew quite what they had come to see. The number of small children in the stalls suggested expectations of a thoroughly traditional kind: a Christmas tree, a Mouse King, and home by bedtime. This despite the fact that the Turkish title is even blunter than the Russian. Where Moscow coyly calls it a “Not-a-Fairy-Tale,” Istanbul simply announces Bu Bir Masal Değil—“This Is Not a Fairy Tale.” The warning was printed on the cover. Few, evidently, read covers.
The orchestra, at least, gave the traditionalists everything they could have wished for. The prologue is played out on the forestage over a closed pit, and the score sounded so immaculate that I briefly concluded the management had economised, left the musicians in Moscow and brought a recording. Not at all. The curtain rose to reveal the orchestra under Anton Torbeev seated at the back of the stage, where it made the finest backdrop the production could have asked for. The company promises the score complete, without cuts and at Tchaikovsky’s own tempi, which presumably accounts for that uncannily studio-perfect sound.
No Mouse King Need Apply
And to this most familiar of scores the authors have set an entirely unfamiliar story. The choreographer Pavel Glukhov and the dramaturg Tatiana Belova, the team behind Novaya Opera’s Les Noces in 2024, have dispensed with both Hoffmann and Petipa and written a libretto of their own: two acts, a prologue and an epilogue, and not a sugar plum in sight.
We are in Champfleury, a village near Reims whose name, the programme helpfully explains, means “flowery field.” It is December 1938, and an old carpenter named Nataniel is carving wooden nutcrackers in soldiers’ uniforms, which sell briskly at Christmas. The ones he treasures most, however, are not for sale: their uniforms are exact copies of the one he and his friends wore twenty years before.
Then memory takes over. December 1914: the young people of the village dance round the tree in the square, Nataniel meets Clara, and nobody pays the slightest attention to old Sandrin, who, as befits any Cassandra, foresees disaster. The men march off to a bugle call, and a snowstorm buries the festivities and the battlefield alike.
April 1919: the survivors come home, Nataniel among them, alive on the outside and wooden within—a nutcracker in the most literal sense. His friends throw him a party, but Clara sees behind him the shades of those who did not return, and there is nothing left but to trust that love is stronger than death. In the epilogue the Waltz of the Snowflakes, that hymn to Christmas wonder, becomes a whirl of passing years in which memory turns into premonition. With 1938 on the calendar, one hardly needs to ask of what.
Clogs, Canes and Cossacks
The young Nataniel is danced by Andrei Lega, the old one by Maxim Isakov, and Clara by Daria Komlyakova. Sandrin, in the best traditions of ballet travesty, goes to a man, Yuri Chulkov, and her dance struck me as an unmistakable wink at Widow Simone’s clog dance in La Fille mal gardée—except that here the percussion is supplied by a pair of walking canes, which the old lady wields with an agility that would shame many a younger woman. The soldiers’ “Russian” dance, and the village ensembles generally, are staged with a gentle smile at the kind of folkloric spectacle the Moiseyev company made famous, all stamping heels and unflagging cheer.
The designer Larisa Lomakina contrives to fit a warm French village and the mechanical world of a toymaker’s workshop into a single space, while the costume designer Svetlana Tegin begins in the faded sepia of old photographs and allows the colours of spring to return to the stage only at the very end.
Do Go
For all of this I applaud the authors with real enthusiasm. Merely to imagine that one might dance something other than Petipa to this music is a considerable feat of fancy; actually to stage it requires courage of a rarer kind. The courage has been noticed. Tatiana Kuznetsova, writing in Kommersant, called the production a requiem for those killed and maimed in the First World War, agreed that it had lived up to its advance billing as a sensation, and observed that Tchaikovsky puts up no resistance whatever. Nor is Glukhov a newcomer: a former dancer who worked with Mikhail Lavrovsky, he curates Diana Vishneva’s Context festival of contemporary dance and won Russia’s Golden Mask as choreographer of the year in 2022.
Purists may find the choreography not wholly without blemish. Some may also find the story of a soldier who returns from war alive but turned to wood rather less historical than its dates suggest. The ballet is, for all that, an event.
Do not, I beg you, take small children (teenagers, by contrast, are just old enough to feel the idea and still young enough to accept something new), and do not expect to come away feeling festive. Go to see how art can leave its comfort zone; it may well inspire you to leave yours. And if it does not, you will at least have heard Tchaikovsky’s glorious score and seen a very fine modern ballet.
I confess that this was the first performance in a good long while at which I felt no urge whatever to look away from the stage: not at the programme, not at my watch, not even at my telephone. Two hours, interval included, passed in what felt like a moment. If you have the chance, go. It is worth it.
