Article by:
Mark Monahan
The Royal Ballet could hardly have chosen a more eye-popping or enjoyable production with which to launch its autumn season. And this is all the more gratifying given that the ballet in question is only six years old – a mere five in its current, three-act reincarnation.
Christopher Wheeldon’s phantasmagorical creation has had the odd naysayer over these few years, but don’t believe them. True, it never quite escapes the episodic, “and then, and then” structure of Carroll’s famous book. And there’s the odd character that you perhaps wish Wheeldon had made more of. But the show has so much going for it in other respects that it feels ungrateful to carp.
Cinematic but also unmistakably balletic, Joby Talbot’s complex, theme-driven score – coruscatingly orchestrated with the help of Christopher Austin – is full of magical surprises. Expertly aided and abetted by lighting guru Natasha Katz, designer Bob Crowley has had an absolute field day too, exploiting every means at his disposal – from puppetry to projection – to send us down the rabbit-hole with the heroine.
Wheeldon, meanwhile, absolutely matches his collaborator’s contributions. This is a ballet that eloquently and respectfully reflects his Royal Ballet heritage (from its three-act structure, reliance on mime, and alternation of grand waltzes and intimate pas de deux, to its very Ashtonian reliance on largely cross-dressing comedy) while nevertheless feeling entirely 21st-century and absolutely its own thing. Together with dramaturge Nicholas Wright, he brings Alice even more to the fore than she is in the book, getting her involved in the action wherever possible, and delving deep into his choreographic box of tricks to bring each of the characters she encounters distinctively alive.
Admittedly, Wednesday night’s performance – performed largely by the 2011 cast – wasn’t quite perfect. Quite apart from a scrappy, under-rehearsed feeling to some of the boys’ ensembles, the fabulous Ed Watson inevitably can’t, at 40, dart about with the same neurotic energy that he brought to the White Rabbit six years ago. Similarly, although as handsome and dependable a partner as ever, Federico Bonelli (38) - taking the part that was originally Sergei Polunin's - doesn’t quite have the youthful bounce that the role of the garden boy/Knave of Hearts demands.
However, another long-standing Royal Ballet member, Laura Morera (standing in for a sadly injured Zenaida Yanowksy) absolutely nails her twin roles as Alice’s mother and (supremely) the Queen of Hearts. As the latter, wheeled around the stage in an increasingly bulbous red contraption that makes her look part queen bee, part preying mantis, part propane gas canister, she is a comic treat: gleefully psychotic, with a smile that could cut steel, but also bringing razor-sharp musicality and blistering precision and attack to every step and gesture. Her delivery of Wheeldon and Talbot’s Rose Adagio-from-hell is a particular joy.
Other splendid performances abound. Steven McRae has lost none of his bite as a dazzling, tap-dancing Mad Hatter (in fact, he was an expert tapper long before ballet ever called), while also very much at the lip-smackingly deranged end of the spectrum is Kristen McNally’s meat-cleaver-welding cook in the magnificently realised kitchen scene. This vignette beefs (or should that be hams?) up the original episode in the book by way of Roald Dahl, Stephen Sondheim and even Tobe Hooper, and it’s quite startling, with as many layers of meaning as you want to read into it.
Also deserving of plaudits are Fernando Montaño’s impossibly slinky Caterpillar, David Yudes’s spring-loaded Frog, and Gary Avis’s operatically OTT Duchess. But top marks go, above all, to Lauren Cuthbertson. As Alice, she avoids all the possible pitfalls of an adult playing a child, bringing pathos, wide-eyed innocence and matter-of-fact resourcefulness to the character, and never forgetting, amid all the elaborate stagecraft, to dance with great delicacy and impeccably classical precision. Wheeldon created the role on her, and it still feels like the part she was born to play.
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