Raymonda at London Coliseum review: Director Tamara Rojo takes bold approach to uneven ballet’s pitfalls

This alert and engaged English National Ballet production underlines departing director Rojo’s ambition and vision

Isaac Hernandez and Shiori Kase in Tamara Rojo’s ‘Raymonda’ by English National Ballet (Johan Persson)

The premiere of English National Ballet’s Raymonda comes with the news that director Tamara Rojo is moving on, taking up the directorship of San Francisco Ballet. Her leadership has always had an international scope, a determination to put the company on the map. And though Raymonda is uneven, it underlines her ambition and her vision. Committed to classical ballet virtuosity, she takes a bold approach to its pitfalls.

The original Raymonda is tricky. Marius Petipa’s 1898 ballet has an appealing Glazunov score and some terrific dancing, wrapped up in a nonsense plot about Crusaders and Saracens. Later revivals have attempted to tweak the narrative. Many companies quietly drop the first two acts and just perform the all-dancing finale.

Rojo’s approach is more radical, shifting the story from a vague chivalric past to the Crimean war in 1854. Like Florence Nightingale or Mary Seacole, her heroine is inspired to take up nursing, traveling to Sebastopol. As before, she is caught between two men – but the Saracen villain of 1898 is now an Ottoman ally, and her attraction to him is no longer just subtext.