Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!, Sadler’s Wells, review: a witty, wonderful, rip-roaring spectacular

Let’s start with two quick pieces of advice about Matthew Bourne’s 1992 Nutcracker (not staged for 10 years, and considerably buffed up since then). First: do yourself an epic favour, and go and see it. Second: if you think the first act is fun – which it is, resplendently so – just you wait until Act II.

After a charming, disarming, fourth-wall-breaking preamble, set to the dainty magic of Tchaikovsky’s overture, we’re plunged into surroundings that are, however, lightyears from the Nutcracker norm. Ever the affectionate, intelligent iconoclast, Bourne has reasoned that the palatial drawing-rooms in which this fairy tale tends to open are already a fantasyland for most of us. And so, setting the piece up for a perfectly chalk-and-cheese contrast between the first and second half, he opens his version in the cold, crazily foreshortened confines of an orphanage, run by the boo-hiss Dr Dross and his human icicle of a wife, Matron.

If this calls to mind the coldly incarcerated setting of Bourne’s 2019 Romeo and Juliet, that’s just fine. In fact, in the context of his canon, you could even see the two shows as a kind of tragi-comic diptych of first love budding against the institutionalised, cruelly adult-dominated odds: one played for tears, the other for laughs.

And those laughs come quickly, with all manner of mischief erupting – increasingly at the expense of Dr Dross (the splendid Reece Causton, done up like a loony Gestapo wannabe) and his spouse (the elegantly comical Daisy May Kemp). Here, the nutcracker is the last gift left in the hamper brought by some local benefactors. And boy, is it ugly, more godawful ventriloquist’s dummy than likely object of anyone’s affections.

Still, Clara (the always engaging Cordelia Braithwaite) is both grateful and smitten. And, in a witty parody of her usual nutcracker dance – while also rather sweetly suggesting the beauty/eye of the beholder maxim – she executes a completely bizarre pas de deux with this pint-sized gargoyle. Magically, hilariously, he soon swells to human proportions – now a besuited, oddly endearing Frankenstein’s monster in what looks alarmingly like a rubber Jimmy Carter mask. (Full marks to dancer Harrison Dowzell, who soon blossoms into something altogether more desirable.)

I’m going to resist the temptation to describe the subsequent transformation scene: suffice it to say that it’s a terrific coup de théâtre, and that the following dissolve between the orphanage and the frozen lake on which Clara and co soon find themselves is as graceful as Bourne’s Sonje Henie-inspired choreography.

As for Act II, oh, where to start. More or less everyone from the first act reappears here, but kaleidoscopically transformed. And Sweetieland, where Clara heads in the pursuit of love, turns out to be a club into which you can enter only if you taste good enough (cue lots of licking, an impishly suggestive comic trope that should delight youngsters on a slapstick level while also soaring benignly above their heads). Trouble is, Clara keeps being barred entry by a martinettish bouncer who’s really a giant mint humbug.

It is outside its doors, then, that the traditional national divertissements play out – except, of course, that tradition has been thrown to the wind. In the Arabian and Chinese dances, for example, Bourne craftily sidesteps any risk of cultural stereotyping by recasting the former as a passage for a marvellously caddish, ciggie-puffing Knickerbocker Glory (Ben Brown, like Terry-Thomas in an ice-cream wig) and the latter, for five ditzy Marshmallow Girls (think Made in Chelsea types on a hoity-toity hen do).

Once again, let’s not spoil the lysergical show-stopper that is Sweetieland itself, and say only that this climactic section is an almost indecently enjoyable atom bomb of camp, but never forgets what Act II of any Nutcracker needs to “do”. What’s striking, too, is that the entire show’s riotous sense of fun doesn’t come at the expense of discipline: in either the playful geometry of Bourne’s ensemble pieces, in his expressive, showpiece solos and duets, or in the performances. His troupe, New Adventures, has never looked sharper, with Shoko Ito’s beautifully expressive Cupid arguably the first among mightily impressive equals.

If Bourne’s The Midnight Bell, earlier this year, was a rare disappointment, Nutcracker! counts as a rip-roaring return to form. In the realms of popular dance theatre, the Bourne supremacy is back.

At Sadler’s Wells until Jan 30, then touring until April. Tickets and details: new-adventures.net