“It’s been a bloody hard year,” Sir Peter Wright cheerfully complains. “It really has.” To turn 90 and still be mightily in demand in the exacting world of classical ballet is no mean achievement. Revivals of his best-loved shows, a controversial memoir and a BBC documentary: a year of celebratory hoopla can take its toll.
Chelsea Pensioners in scarlet uniform tootle about outside his west London mansion block, but although his voice is quiet and he claims his memory is recalcitrant, Wright isn’t any kind of retiring. His productions of classic 19th-century ballets — The Sleeping Beauty’s grandeur, Giselle’s heartbreak, the irresistible Nutcracker — are staples of the repertory, not just in Britain but in many international companies. He has worked with almost everyone, and his flat is stuffed with paper, photos and memorabilia — from ballet history to a volume by the avant-garde choreographer Raimund Hoghe. After all the public celebrations, his family is due the next day for their own party. “I must tidy up,” he tuts.
He hasn’t had a lot of time for tidying this year. As well as British shows, he has revived The Sleeping Beauty in Budapest and Giselle in Munich. “It gets harder and harder for me to travel everywhere,” he admits. “But just my presence helps sometimes — it’s easy for productions to become very accurate and all that, but they should always look like the first night.” His cherished productions of The Nutcracker are even more demanding. “There are so many casts — 11 at Covent Garden and 13 in Birmingham — I can’t possibly rehearse them all.”
Those Nutcrackers are many people’s toothsome gateway ballet, all sugar and snowflakes and a plush Tchaikovsky score. In the UK, Wright competes with himself for the best Nutcracker — the stolidly handsome Royal Opera House version rules in London, while Birmingham boasts its own sparkly production.
His Royal Ballet Nutcracker, unveiled in 1984, was meticulously researched, cleaving as closely as possible to the original 19th-century production, of which only a few sequences are recorded: the snowflakes, Chinese dance and grand pas de deux. “It worked,” he considers, “but it wasn’t a stunning success — and it wasn’t really me.” The ballet opens at a prosperous German family’s Christmas party, so he and the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman visited Nuremberg for cinnamon-dusted inspiration. Unfortunately, he says, “she fell in love with the gingerbread. I wanted the set to be white and glistening, but it turned out rather gingery.”
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He returned to the Kingdom of Sweets when he led the Royal’s sister company to Birmingham in 1990 as Birmingham Royal Ballet. “I was on a high: I’d got my own company and decided to dedicate The Nutcracker to the city, because they had been so marvellous.” This time, he worked with the designer John Macfarlane, “who is absolutely wonderful — he sees everything as theatre”. Miyako Yoshida, still his favourite Sugar Plum Fairy, starred, the story was streamlined, the wonder enhanced, and it became, he says proudly, a “considerable success”.
When Wright revives a show, he says, he can’t resist tinkering. He has loosened the Covent Garden production’s stays over the years — most recently, binning the cringey exoticism of its Chinese dance, which “didn’t reflect on present-day China”. So which Nutcracker is his secret favourite? “I like the Covent Garden one for the period thing, but I like the Birmingham one’s imaginative side, the look of it. Though since I’ve changed the London one, I’ve become much more fond of it.”
Wright first encountered The Nutcracker during the war, when Sadler’s Wells Ballet performed just the colourful second act. “I absolutely loved every moment.” Later, he appeared in a production by Frederick Ashton, designed by Cecil Beaton. “I was in the Danse Arabe,” he recalls, “three men and a rather exotic lady.” He danced in that Sadler’s Wells touring company alongside emerging talents such as Lynn Seymour. “We were full of energy and personality,” he beams, “though not that much technique.”
That’s hardly surprising — Wright didn’t go to ballet school. Dance was not the career his parents marked out for him. “They wanted me to have a safe, well-paid job. My father was a Quaker, a very good man in lots of ways. But theatre or entertainment didn’t register with him at all.” In despair at wasting time, Wright ran away from school. “Bedales was a wonderful school, and I loved it there. But I also knew that day by day it was getting later, and if I wanted to be a dancer I needed training. My father was terribly upset about it. He gave me his blessing, but no money. He said, ‘You’ve got to find your way.’”
Wright joined Kurt Jooss’s company as an apprentice: “It was a hopeless way of training, but I spent all day in the theatre.” That theatrical instinct served him well when he went to Stuttgart in the 1960s and the director John Cranko persuaded him to stage Giselle, his first classic ballet. Initially reluctant, Wright fell in love both with the research and the challenge of making it live on stage. A great advocate of recording ballet — he is president of the Benesh Institute, the leading written system for recording human movement — his theatrical juices run red. “You must never be boring,” he insists.
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“You see plenty of athleticism these days in contemporary ballets,” he remarks, without notable enthusiasm. Margot Fonteyn, the celebrated British ballerina, lacked athletic dazzle but famously cast a spell over audiences. “I did three television productions with Margot and was always amazed by the energy she put into everything.” Fonteyn told him she worked to distract audiences from her modest technique. “Mind you,” he continues, “when I first saw her in the war, she didn’t have the warmth she got later.”
Wright credits the master choreographer Frederick Ashton with adding glow to her precision. “He used to watch her performances and rehearsals and would advise her about how to use her eyes to reach up into the amphitheatre, which is very far away. At one time, it was considered bad taste to project too much. Communication! That’s what it’s all about, even in an abstract ballet.”
Ashton’s elegantly theatrical nous was a great influence on Wright, who worked with him on a production of The Sleeping Beauty. “That was difficult,” he sighs (it’s one of the pleasures of Wright’s stories that he is happy to nudge the great off their pedestals). Wright was only due to assist Ashton, “but he gradually pushed me more. He really only wanted to do bits of new choreography, and I suppose he saw I could cope with all the big scenes.” Even so, “he was an extraordinary talent, a genius, I think”. And what was it like to watch genius at work? “He was a bit lazy sometimes. Ashton got inspiration from the artists he was working with — he would even go so far as saying, ‘What’s your favourite step?’ But once he got onto something, it just flowed out of him.”
Wright’s candour can get him into trouble — the more tart passages of his memoir were widely reported earlier this year, and factual inaccuracies incurred the wrath of Kenneth MacMillan’s widow, Deborah (a corrected edition is due next year). Some of that acerbity was directed at Rudolf Nureyev: a bravura star of untrammelled ego. Wright readily acknowledges the Russian’s impact on the art form, but he was a tricksy colleague. They first met in Stuttgart, when Nureyev arrived to see his lover, the dancer Erik Bruhn, and to appear in a gala at the theatre.
“I had to look after Rudolf,” Wright says. “Very difficult. Very difficult. He didn’t really bother to learn the dance properly, but he was very fussy about what costume he wore.” Why so? “To put it crudely, he liked to show off his bum.” Nureyev rejected an elegant white costume that “went below the cheeks” —Wright snuffles with laughter —nabbing another dancer’s outfit instead. He finished his patchily studied solo while the music was still playing, but simply shrugged and left the stage. “The audience loved it.”
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Wright was no pushover and describes himself later taking no nonsense from Nureyev at Covent Garden. “After that, he behaved perfectly. He was just pushing people, testing them to see how far he could go.”
No such tantrums from Wright, who seems as delighted to be working in ballet as when he first scarpered from school. “I don’t feel any different now I’m 90,” he says. Still 18 inside, I ask? “18? 16!”
Dancing The Nutcracker — Inside the Royal Ballet, BBC2, Christmas Day, 4pm; The Ballet Master — Sir Peter Wright at 90, BBC4, Dec 27, 7pm