Peter Wright's staging of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, the ballet that has defined a British Christmas for forty years, returns to Covent Garden this winter.
Peter Wright’s 1984 production of The Nutcracker for The Royal Ballet returns to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Thursday 3 December 2026 to Wednesday 13 January 2027.
Tchaikovsky did not want to write The Nutcracker. He thought the Hoffmann story, filtered through Dumas, was thin, and the plot does stop after the first act. The second act is a series of divertissements at a party.
The score is one that children across the western world can hum. Its celesta solo came from an instrument Tchaikovsky heard in a Paris shop and had shipped to Russia in secret, so Rimsky-Korsakov would not use it first.
Wright restored the narrative logic that had drifted out of the second act. He tied Drosselmeyer to the plot rather than leaving him a magician, and gave the company a version to grow up inside.
The production has run almost every Christmas since 1984. Wright also made Birmingham Royal Ballet’s own Nutcracker.
He was born in 1926, so this run falls in his centenary year.