Peter Wright's The Nutcracker returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 3 December 2026 to 13 January 2027.
Tchaikovsky did not want to write The Nutcracker. He thought the Hoffmann story, filtered through Dumas, was thin, and he was proved half right: the plot stops after the first act and the second is a series of divertissements at a party. What he produced anyway is the score every child in the western world can hum, including the celesta solo he heard in a Paris shop and had shipped to Russia in secret so that Rimsky-Korsakov would not use the instrument first.
Peter Wright made this production for the Royal Ballet in 1984 and it has run almost every Christmas since. He restored the narrative logic that had drifted out of the second act, tied Drosselmeyer to the plot rather than leaving him a magician, and gave the company a version to grow up inside. Wright also made the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker, so between the two productions he is responsible for most of the Christmas ballet performed in this country.
It returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Thursday 3 December 2026 to Wednesday 13 January 2027, and the season marks Wright’s centenary — he was born in 1926 and is still alive to see it, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about the choreographer of a fifty-year-old Christmas staple. Sixty performances is the run, and it pays for a good deal of the rest of the year.