The new, woke Nutcracker made me want to vote Reform

For the past 11 years (barring 2020 when Covid intervened), my daughter and I have made an annual visit to the London Coliseum to watch The Nutcracker together.

The first time we went, she was only two years old. When the interval came, she looked at me and said, ‘Daddy, put the ballet back on’. Having only seen The Nutcracker on YouTube up to that point, she didn’t understand that I couldn’t just make the ballerinas dance at will through the power of the internet.

This year, our father-daughter ritual was ruined by the fact that The Nutcracker has become the latest victim of some species of wokeism. In its wisdom, the English National Ballet has taken Tchaikovsky’s great work, purged it of certain ‘problematic’ elements and made it acceptable for modern, leftish-liberal tastes. In doing so, the artistic director has made it incalculably worse.

They have transplanted the setting from Germany in the middle of the 19th century to London during the Edwardian era. This has allowed the director to shoehorn in the Suffragettes, who appear at random intervals to brandish signs and transfer some girl power to Clara, our female protagonist. She duly responds by brandishing a sword and killing off the bad guys. No passive women in this one, people – we need to have Clara kill all the villains early on so that the rest of the story is rendered nonsensical.

It only gets worse as it goes on. Near the start of the second act, there is a segment featuring different dances from around the world – one from Spain, one from the Arabic world, one from China, one from Russia. The dances have now all been ‘cleaned up’ and given a sickly sweet twist so as to avoid offending people. The Arabic one has been stripped of any regional flavour and instead has the dancers appear as sticks of cinnamon. The Chinese portion featured two blokes dressed up as candied red berries. And the Russian one has Ukrainian cakes take the stage.

Look, I’m as passionately in favour of Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion as anyone. But cleansing The Nutcracker of all Russian content is nonsensical for many reasons – the main one being that the composer of the ballet was Russian. It is possible to oppose Putin’s aggression without purging our cultural lives of everything produced by his country.

If you want to create a ballet set in Edwardian England that has a gallant girl being inspired by the Suffragettes to slay the rats in her dreams, go for it. But why use the work of a genius like Tchaikovsky to do so? If the artistic team behind this revisionism are so horrified by Tchaikovsky’s place and time, then don’t piggyback on his art in the first place.

I could go on here, but you get the gist. At one point, a character ‘flosses’ – as in the dance move popularised online, rather than the teeth-picking ritual, although the latter might have been more entertaining to watch. It’s as if English National Ballet feels the need to modernise everything these days and make it ‘relevant’. Can’t we just enjoy something lovely like The Nutcracker, something that comes from a bygone era, without feeling the need to update it? After all, no one is going to see Tchaikovsky’s festive classic hoping for the latest in right-on opinion – it is meant to be a comforting spectacle for families to enjoy together, not a political lecture.

That’s perhaps where the worst element of this new production lies. In the original, Clara and her brother have a fight. When Clara comes back to reality, after the dream, she and her brother make amends. In this production, Clara doesn’t come back at all, staying in the fantasy world. It removes a crucial element of The Nutcracker, the joy of family reunion, and replaces it with some vague idea of how it is better to live in a fantasy for the rest of your life. While this production fails on almost every level, at least here it successfully captures the wilful delusion of the modern activist set.

It was almost enough to make me, a lifelong liberal, want to vote Reform.

Nick Tyrone is a journalist, author and think-tanker. His latest novel, The Patient, is out now.