World premiere review: The Royal Ballet's The Winter's Tale

The premiere of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's brand new ballet was an exhilarating triumph, writes Jenny Gilbert

The possibility of generating a big, grown-up, three-act narrative hit has been – until now – a receding dream for the Royal Ballet . The last, arguably, was Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling in the late 1970s, with several expensive misfires in between. So the arrival of T he Winter’s Tale  – a bold, fully achieved, full evening story ballet with broad appeal yet with dramatic depth in spades – signals a turning point in the company’s fortunes. It also sets a seal on the status of its creator Christopher Wheeldon . He has been a good choreographer since Polyphonia in 2001. He now seems likely to be remembered as a great one.

This is all the more remarkable given his subject matter. Shakespeare’s late play is often seen as problematic – half Othello-like tragedy, half bucolic rom com, with tricky time shifts and a narrative style that draws heavily on anecdote and memory – challenge enough for a theatre director, let alone one who must tell the story without words. This Wheeldon achieves not only with clarity and pace (the action hurtles towards the climactic curtain of Act II like the chase scene in an action movie) but mostly without resort to mime. A synthesis of dance, music and design becomes the conduit of meaning.

Wheeldon clearly has the knack for collaboration, re-assembling the brilliant team he used in Alice . Here Bob Crowley’s designs are elegantly spare so that scene changes – as when the characters perambulate back and forth from King Leontes’ indoor court to the gardens – are smoothly effected. The wintry blue light of the first half (where a king’s unwarranted jealousy freezes out life and love) finds contrast with a golden haze in the second, the stage empty but for a spectacular spreading oak tree (prompting applause), its branches hung with glittering charms, presaging the jewelled pendant that will eventually identify the 16-year-old Perdita as the baby girl King Leontes abandoned on a rocky hillside. Even the play’s famous stage direction 'Exit, pursued by bear' is imaginatively followed, the human prey engulfed by a tsunami-like expanse of floating silk: a deadly, bear-shaped wave.

The triumph of Joby Talbot’s music, never less than gorgeous with its artful layering of thrumming orchestral sound, is its tact. It pushes the action forward when required, but never hogs the attention, and never – in a story with so many surprising twists and turns – gives the game away. Many of the key dramatic moments – most poignantly when Paulina realises that Perdita is her mistress’s lost child – are beautifully understated, and all the more memorable for that. 

Carefully calibrated feeling abounds in this Winter’s Tale, and innovation too. Wheeldon’s choreography is so replete with lively ideas that you stop taking special note of them: they just keep coming. And his choreographic language proves fully capable of embracing the story’s emotional extremes, from the twitchy angularity of the paranoid king (a sterling performance from Edward Watson), to the warm composure of his Queen (Lauren Cuthbertson) and the dignity and wisdom of her companion Paulina, who in Zenaida Yanowsky’s hands becomes the lynchpin of the piece. For sheer verve and joy in movement, Act II is an almost uninterrupted dance marathon, complete with on-stage Balkan folk band and a remarkably extended pas de deux for Sarah Lamb and Steven McRae that uses every ounce of their gymnastic and fleet-footed talent.

Ballet managements have a word for commissions that warrant a long-term place in the repertory, and The Winter’s Tale is ‘a keeper’ by anyone’s reckoning. Queuing for returns or day seats may already be the only option for its current outing, but any such effort will be amply repaid. Royal Ballet, hang out the flags.

The Winter's Tale is In rep at the Royal Opera House until 8 May 14

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