Rojo’s choreographic updating is a visual feast: English National Ballet’s Raymonda reviewed

Velvet waistcoats, technicolour tulle and some very spangly harem pants — English National Ballet’s atelier must have been mighty busy prepping for Raymonda, Tamara Rojo’s lavish new reboot of Marius Petipa’s 1898 ballet. Antony McDonald’s costumes shimmer as vibrantly as his stage design, and Rojo’s choreographic treatment is its own visual feast, packed with pinwheeling set pieces that repackage Petipa’s fearsome technique with their own pizazz.

I can’t say the narrative is quite so electric, even with its conscientious redraft, which excises the xenophobia of the original scenario, along with its damsel-in-distress storyline, and trades the 13th century for the 19th, with the Crusades swapped for the Crimean War. In this iteration, Raymonda (Shiori Kase) pursues a calling as a wartime nurse and finds herself caught between a clean-cut British soldier (Isaac Hernandez) and a slick Turkish ambassador (Jeffrey Cirio). I say ‘finds herself’ because despite the bid to give Raymonda more agency here, things still mostly seem to happen to her.