Artistic director Wayne Eagling has kicked off English National Ballet’s London Christmas season with the announcement of a new commission. The British choreographer Michael Corder is to mount a three-act adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s grim fairytale The Snow Queen in October 2007. Set to have its premiere at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool, the production will feature the music of Prokofiev, principally his score for the ballet The Stone Flower.

In the meantime ENB has plenty to be getting on with, staging three full-length ballets at the Coliseum. On the heels of Derek Deane’s Alice in Wonderland (December 28-January 7) will come Mary Skeaping’s Giselle (January 10-13). But first there is The Nutcracker, a collaboration between the choreographer Christopher Hampson and the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe that dates from 2002.

Like ENB’s Alice, this version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s source story is more a design-led blockbuster than an example of outstanding classical dance. If you want majesty and magic, look to more traditional stagings. Scarfe’s bright, often camp, sets and costumes overwhelm and outdo Hampson’s mainly competent contribution at almost every turn. The wigs alone catch the eye, resembling candyfloss spun into various shapes and crazy artificial hues.

The bustling first act is staged as if inside a storybook frame. Our heroine Clara (Erina Takahashi, too worldly in a Louise Brooks bob the colour of a blood orange) lives in an environment of ostentatious upper-class comfort. ENB’s dancers delve into the broad cartoon behaviour of their characters, none more so than Adam Pudney as the Zimmer-framed Grandpa driven to nimble feats of distraction by the attentions of Jane Haworth’s curvaceous platinum blonde bombshell.

The engineer of the evening’s entertainment is the sunny rather than sinister magician Drosselmeyer, played with panache by Fabian Reimair. In a particularly pleasant moment he strips the family maid of her dowdy uniform and converts her, briefly, into a Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire.

Scarfe’s invention spills between the acts. The inhabitants of the Land of Snow fly out of a gigantic refrigerator. Clara and her now-humanised Nutcracker (Arionel Vargas) depart it on the wings of a giant origami bird. Act II occurs in an alfresco Kingdom of the Sweets, where the couple views the parade of national dances from a literal chocolate box. There Daria Klimentova’s Sugar Plum Fairy and Dmitri Gruzdyev as her Prince gave a perfectly correct, rather than inspired, interpretation of the big pas de deux.

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