Tamara Rojo’s Raymonda — a bold updating

Despite its lustrous Glazunov score and a dazzling ballerina role, it has been more than 20 years to the best of my recall since anyone presented all three acts of Raymonda in London. It was a bold choice for Tamara Rojo’s directorial and choreographic debut — and swan song. After 10 years at English National Ballet, the Spanish star takes charge at San Francisco Ballet later this year. Her Raymonda at the London Coliseum is fluently written and strongly danced, but the updated setting and new feminist scenario are not entirely successful.

When the 79-year-old Marius Petipa created the ballet in 1898, he was still at the height of his powers. But his focus was on making a setting for his choreographic gems; the plot — heroine’s fiancé returns from the Crusades to see off his fascinating Saracen rival — was vanishingly slight. Rojo was exasperated by the heroine’s passivity and found the concept of a Muslim villain “problematic” and “offensive”. She decided, together with her dramaturg Lucinda Coxon, to update the action from the 12th century to the 19th, making Raymonda herself a Florence Nightingale figure who shuns bourgeois convention to become a battlefield nurse.

Say what you like about the Petipa storyboard, it does provide perfectly logical pretexts for dancing: the Countess’s court; a vision scene; a big fat Hungarian wedding. Rojo has a flair for patterning ensembles and, with the help of ballet archivist Doug Fullington, repurposes and multiplies the familiar Petipa steps with considerable skill. But there isn’t a lot to dance about in a war zone and the merry measures of the overlong first act are hard to swallow, despite the watching trio of bandaged infantrymen. The dream sequence in which the lamp-bearing nurses are joined, Bayadère-style, by the ghosts of fallen soldiers is much more successful.

Antony McDonald frames the stage with a false proscenium and sloping upstage shelf, allowing projections to supply more detailed information. Alexander Gunnarsson’s videos tell the story Hollywood-style using a montage of newspaper headlines and animated maps. Rojo grimly boasted that her production would be tutu-free but McDonald’s mid-calf Victorian gowns, while they float prettily enough in pirouette, make one’s scissor fingers itch.

Raymonda’s two friends find new functions in the reworked narrative. Henriette, coyly dubbed a “free-spirited woman of the camp”, is danced by a tireless Julia Conway and Clemence (Precious Adams) is reimagined as a nursing nun, forearms criss-crossed as a crucifix. The on-form male corps power through their precision-drilled routines and the lusty peasant finale. Rojo is acutely sensitive to ballet’s history of cultural appropriation and her national dances were created in collaboration with the Vaganova Academy’s Vadim Sirotin and Turkish dance specialist Ceyda Tanc.

Shiori Kase gives an efficient but oddly uninvolving account of the heroine torn between Love and Vocation. Isaac Hernández relished his countless bravura solos as Raymonda’s fiancé, but his thunder was stolen by Jeffrey Cirio as his rival Abdur Rahman, who put his virtuosity to dramatic use in showstopping sequences that read like an outpouring of passion, rather than mere display.

★★★☆☆

To January 23, ballet.org.uk