Rojo’s choreographic updating is a visual feast: English National Ballet’s Raymonda reviewed

Velvet waistcoats, technicolour tulle and some very spangly harem pants — English National Ballet’s atelier must have been mighty busy prepping for Raymonda, Tamara Rojo’s lavish new reboot of Marius Petipa’s 1898 ballet. Antony McDonald’s costumes shimmer as vibrantly as his stage design, and Rojo’s choreographic treatment is its own visual feast, packed with pinwheeling set pieces that repackage Petipa’s fearsome technique with their own pizazz.

I can’t say the narrative is quite so electric, even with its conscientious redraft, which excises the xenophobia of the original scenario, along with its damsel-in-distress storyline, and trades the 13th century for the 19th, with the Crusades swapped for the Crimean War. In this iteration, Raymonda (Shiori Kase) pursues a calling as a wartime nurse and finds herself caught between a clean-cut British soldier (Isaac Hernandez) and a slick Turkish ambassador (Jeffrey Cirio). I say ‘finds herself’ because despite the bid to give Raymonda more agency here, things still mostly seem to happen to her. A Good Man proposes to her, and so she finds herself engaged. A Sexy Man flirts with her, and so she finds herself torn. The will-she-won’t-she scuffle is definitely an improvement — no scary foreign rapists here! — but we’re not left with much tension, unless you count freighted Victorian mores. It’s only at the end, when Raymonda rejects both men in favour of her vocation, that her voice starts to emerge.

However, classical ballet is remarkably resourceful with paper-thin plots, and this show works hard to inhabit its Victorian setting and all its connotations of hearth and home. Act One is a sepia portrait of chummy soldiers and tender nurses on the front line, while Act Three transports us to the English countryside for windmilling petticoats and a heel-clicking wedding jig.