Behind the scenes at the ballet

Audiences enjoying The Nutcracker at the Royal Opera House won't know it, but the technical wizardry involved in mounting such a production is a kind of magic in itself. Nadine Meisner fell under the spell of its backstage world

After The Nutcracker's Christmas tree has grown gigantically and the snow has swirled into a thick blizzard, after you have left the magic and returned home to reality, spare the thought that actually, you were aware of only half the performers. You watched the dancers; you heard the orchestra. But you didn't see the technicians who move the scenery and oversee the lights, or the stage manager who co-ordinates the whole performance from the tiny prompt box hidden behind the proscenium arch.

After The Nutcracker's Christmas tree has grown gigantically and the snow has swirled into a thick blizzard, after you have left the magic and returned home to reality, spare the thought that actually, you were aware of only half the performers. You watched the dancers; you heard the orchestra. But you didn't see the technicians who move the scenery and oversee the lights, or the stage manager who co-ordinates the whole performance from the tiny prompt box hidden behind the proscenium arch.

It is totally integrated group work and, as ballet stage manager, Johanna Adams is the crucial link between the dancers, conductor and stage crew. She devises the lists of cues with the production team, writes them down, rehearses them and probably dreams about them, too. During a performance she communicates them to the conductor, the stage hands and the lighting board located at the centre of the Stalls Circle. She does this by light signals, flicking switches in front of her, or verbally, into her closed-circuit microphone. She consults the book containing the score and cues, most of which are based on the music. And she watches two monitors: one that shows the conductor, "which is important, because occasionally you take cues on his upbeat"; and the other showing the stage. The Nutcracker has so many scenery changes in the first act's 45 minutes, and so many, sometimes simultaneous, components that could go wrong, that her concentration has to be fierce. "The adrenaline really runs and the time just flashes by. When you get to the end of the evening, you feel an incredible high."

These days, while performances may still be draining for her, but for the stage crew they are certainly physically easier and less hazardous, thanks to the reopened theatre's state-of-art computerised technology. The hanging scenery, for example, is now operated by electronic motors, where before men had to pull on ropes and laboriously balance each item by attaching heavy weights. But that doesn't mean things can't go wrong. For all its touch-button equipment, last year's Nutcracker tree notoriously failed to grow and its sledge refused to budge, while all manner of problems caused the cancellation of Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre. As the project manager Jeffrey Phillips explains: "We'd planned to have three months from September to December to get used to the equipment, but that got eroded and we had to learn on the job." The Nutcracker tree was supposed to rise upwards on one of the six lifts that divide the stage into vertically moveable sections. But they hadn't reckoned with the super-sophisticated safety features, which triggered the lift to stop whenever its edges touched anything.

Jeffrey Phillips has been at the opera house 42 years. He started as a ballet dancer, became a stage manager, built scenery, even sang in the chorus. He worked for 10 years on the plans for the new stage facilities and has agreed to give me a grand tour. But first, I stand on the stage and stare out at the auditorium - the best way to view it, the gold concentric edges of the tiers suddenly achieving a serene harmony. A rehearsal for MacMillan's Gloria has just ended and I can watch the sprung ballet floor gliding electronically backwards. It goes to the rear stage behind the main stage, to be replaced by the opera floor and a "wagon" (moving platform) transferring from one of the side stages with scenery for Katya Kabanova already assembled on it.

This is a modern opera-house jigsaw of mobile floors and wagons, as well as various adjoining stages, as vast as hangars, for storage and rehearsals. The cavernous fly-tower (27m high inside) is "triple decker", able to hang scenery on its 108 bars at three levels: the stage level for the immediate performance; the middle level for changes in the same performance; and the top level for other productions in the current repertoire. This means it usually accommodates three or four productions and parts of others. Jeffrey shows me the "nomads", transportable computers that control the fly-tower bars. I then stare at more lights than I have ever seen in my life - 600 of them, all operated electronically. Units of men are busy everywhere, hammers and metal clamps attached to their belts like Colt 45s. I am humbled by the complex timetable required to slot all the different activities together.

Jeffrey takes me down to the bowels of the building where sets are delivered and fitted up, or stored in "pallets" (huge mobile troughs) on their way out to the scenery store in South Wales. We also go to the theatre's highest point, level 11 of the fly tower, called the grid, a boggling slatted floor on which rest the pulleys and wires moving the bars up and down. We stand on a walkway, because only authorised personnel, rid of all small objects, are allowed on the slats. "A penny falling all that way down could cut open a person's head," says Jeffrey. The space is eerily quiet, the machinery so perfect that it is noiseless.

With its contrasts of vastness and tucked away corners, its enormous profusion of deep chasms and vertiginous ledges, workshops, dance studios, offices and small Linbury theatre, the Royal Opera House feels like a contemporary Gormenghast. We climb up to the lighting boxes along part of the auditorium dome, their windows concealed behind panels when the house lights are up; we go to the central eye of the dome where more lights operate. To his surprise Jeffrey finds his camera, long forgotten there after he took it up to take bird's-eye pictures.

By this time, the grand tour has taken over two hours and I haven't yet seen everything. Exhausted, I am glad he takes the trouble to escort me to the stage door. Left to find my own hopeless way out, I might have become like the camera, lost in some remote eyrie until 100 years later I would be found, not so much a Sleeping Beauty as a shrivelled and very dead dance critic.

* 'The Nutcracker', Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) 22 Dec - 20 Jan