Sir Peter Wright’s The Nutcracker is like the first decoration you hang at Christmas time and the last one you put away. It is, in fact, so beautiful that its festivity endures all year round. For costume and set designer John Macfarlane, it was crucial that the design also reflected the darkness inherent in the story.

Macfarlane uses grand colour schemes and a painterly approach throughout the production. He drew on Edwardian influences for the Christmas party scene of act one, with the influence of the Ingmar Bergman film Fanny and Alexander extending to all aspects of its costumes and austere sets.

The atmosphere in the Stahlbaum residence is – despite its grand mantelpiece, flickering candelight and brightly baubled Christmas tree – as cold as the rear window that illuminates the blue harshness of a snowy landscape. There is all the regality of a salon without the intimacy of a family home: full-length maid uniforms with bonnets and aprons; frock coats and smart gold-trimmed navy suits for the gentlemen, and prancing girls in wheat muslin dresses spilling with frills. While being beautiful they all point to the regimented sensibilities from which our wide-eyed Clara escapes into the world of imagination.

The magic begins to happen when the clock strikes midnight and Drosselmeyer, a family friend-slash-magician, appears in a cosmically charged cape. In one of the production’s most spectacular moments, the Christmas tree grows to a colossal height. As Macfarlane says, “All these big ballets have pivot points in the score, when you should really travel, travel, travel. You can’t shortchange them with the staging”.

The next thing we know, Clara is overpowering a giant Napoleonic rat with her ballet slipper. Storytelling logic gives way to dream logic as we travel with her and the life-sized Nutcracker prince on a journey through a crystalline wonderland to the Land of Sweets. It is here that we breathe in the bold, sculptural costumes that feature in a series of arresting divertissements. Tutus reach dizzying heights of sublimity, climaxing in the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, whose sugary ‘greyed pink’ tutu features over 10,000 hand-sewn beads. With material sourced from all over the globe, and influences stretching back to the Ballets Russes, there is no shortage of attention paid to the lavish costumes. Like the transformative set design, they combine European fairytale and romantic ballet tradition to create stage sorcery at its most magical.

This is an edited excerpt from Anna Sutton’s article for The Australian Ballet’s The Nutcracker souvenir programme. The Nutcracker plays in Melbourne and Sydney in September and December.

Photography by Jim McFarlane featuring artists of The Australian Ballet