West Sussex dates as Nutcracker tale goes on tour for Christmas

Their Christmas offering for 2022 is The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Dates coming up include St Peter's Church, Brighton on Thursday, November 17 at 7.30pm; Danny House, Hurstpierpoint on Sunday, November 20 at 5pm; The Guildhall, Chichester on Sunday, November 27 at 3pm; The Barn, Tilgate Park, Crawley on Saturday, December 3 at 3pm; and St Nicholas' Church, Bramber on Tuesday, December 13 at 5pm. Running time: approximately 80 minutes. It is nearly Christmas and Maria and her brother Frederick can hardly wait to tear open their presents. But an early gift from their godfather of a beautiful wooden Nutcracker soldier to Maria was hardly what she had expected. Little does Maria know that this small wooden figure was once a real child, not much older than herself, turned to wood for daring to cross the evil Mouse-King. But just before midnight, when the magic of Christmas is strongest, Maria’s beloved Nutcracker comes to life in order to march into battle and fulfil a deadly mission…

Associate artistic director Ethan Taylor, so often on the stage for the company, is stepping back to semi-produce with this show: “Our brand-new adaptation of E T A Hoffman's much-loved story – packed with music, merriment and plenty of Christmas magic – will be sure to warm hearts and spread joy. We have done A Christmas Carol and The Snow Queen and we were looking for some other novel that we could do this Christmas. We found that Nutcracker was one where people would know the story a bit but from the ballet and actually if you go back to the book it is very different to the ballet. The story is obviously still the same but there are lots of different little alterations and there is no sugar plum fairy for one thing in the book. We've tried to keep our version as faithful as possible to the original novel but we have also tried to add in some of our own Christmas magic. Ultimately it is a family-orientated story for Christmas centred on looking forward to the Christmas celebrations and doing all the preparations but there is also this idea of there being another magical realm like Narnia, this magical other place that is almost hidden in plain view, just around the corner and there are great dramas and physical battles in this other kingdom that are going on, overlapping into the natural realm so you get these magical journeys and transformations and meetings and in the end Christmas is saved and the magic of Christmas is restored.”

The company are delighted to be effectively back to normal now: “At the start of this year it was a bit difficult. We were rehearsing for our spring tour and I think it was maybe the month before the remaining restrictions were lifted. But we still wanted to be careful. We found that it was right to have a degree of distancing and various other measures in place because we found that people were still perhaps a little bit cautious and so that's what we did and we had a good summer. We thought that if we rushed back to being completely normal too quickly then you would risk damaging your audience and the company.”