The Snow Queen: English National Ballet, London Coliseum
WHAT a frustrating evening. While there is much to admire in Michael Corder's ballet of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale, the overall sensation is of a production that's too much choreographic icing, not enough dramatic cake.
Having seen in her magic mirror a vision of childhood innocence in the figures of Gerda (Crystal Costa) and Kay (Yat-Sen Chang), the jealous Snow Queen (Daria Klimentova) smashes the glass into a thousand fragments and implants two splinters into Kay, freezing his heart, before carrying him off to her frosty lair.
Aided by a gypsy girl and an unusually accommodating reindeer, Gerda sets off to find Kay and undo the spell.
Corder has manipulated the narrative by reducing Gerda's epic journey and augmenting the character of the Snow Queen.
Consequently we get a lot of dancing in sparkly white costumes against a sparkly white set, which advances the story not a jot, and precious little of the shifting environment of Gerda's quest.
The two effective set pieces are a ball at the Snow Queen's court that recalls Polanski's Dance Of The Vampires and the battle between Kay and Gerda and frosty monarch, who swoops down upon them held aloft by two wolves like some Arctic bird of prey.
Much of the problem lies with the music, Prokofiev's The Tale Of The Stone Flower. Julian Philips' arrangement cannot disguise the fact that the score is dramatically uneven.
Aside from Gerda's encounter with the gypsies and Klimentova curling a lethal leg around Chang's throat, moments of high drama are wasted by inattentive staging.
The first entrance of the Queen and piercing of Kay's eye and heart are thrown away. As one of the few choreographers working in the classical tradition on a grand scale, Corder is to be encouraged but here he has stuffed the stage with steps and ignored the mime element necessary to tell a coherent story.
Klimentova is an effectively icy queen, even if she has a tendency to pose rather than act. Max Westwell is a wonderfully strokeable reindeer and Senri Kou and Kei Akahoshi as two vivacious foxes are so well co-ordinated they might have been dancing in a mirror.
VERDICT 3/5
Box office: 0871 911 0200, until January 17
