Isabella Kinch and Ben Rudisin in The Winter's Tale. This ballet is playing at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until Nov. 21, 2025.Bruce Zinger/Supplied
Title: The Winter’s Tale
Choreographer: Christopher Wheeldon
Score by: Joby Talbot
Company: National Ballet of Canada
Venue: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
City: Toronto
Year: To Nov. 21, 2025
Populism isn’t a term you hear often in ballet, but it’s useful when considering the work of English choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. While Wheeldon spent his early career focused on non-narrative choreography, he changed tack in 2011 and hasn’t strayed from full-length story ballets since.
His 2014 ballet The Winter’s Tale, a co-production by the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet, may not have the same brand-name appeal as his 2011 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or his 2022 Like Water for Chocolate, but its creative provenance is similar. Seeing the National Ballet’s remount of the production on Friday night gave me a fresh chance to ponder Wheeldon’s uncanny ability to please a crowd.
Grouped among Shakespeare’s problem plays, The Winter’s Tale isn’t an obvious choice for a choreographer. It’s typically considered a tragicomedy, not because it inhabits that squirm-inducing no man’s land between sad and funny, but because it swings like a pendulum from one genre to the next.
Isabella Kinch and Ben Rudisin in The Winter's Tale. Kinch presents a soulful and dignified Hermione.Karolina Kuras/Supplied
The early acts give us the deeply disturbed mind of a jealous, misogynistic husband, while the middle section takes us to the bubble gum paradise of Bohemia, where young lovers live in sheltered bliss. In order to mash these disparate worlds into something that approximates resolution, the play ends with the head-scratching twist of a statue coming to life.
It can be hard to swallow amid the darkness and seriousness of the rest of Shakespeare’s verse, but when disbelief is already suspended through the language of ballet, the magic works. Using a sweep of luscious movement set to Joby Talbot’s dramatic score, Wheeldon provides what the play arguably lacks: a clear narrative arc with an emotionally satisfying ending.
The cleverness in this is that there’s something for audiences of all stripes, making it box-office gold, which is Wheeldon’s wheelhouse. People who normally panic about “not understanding” dance will be able to follow the ballet’s plot with minimal effort, while enjoying Bob Crowley’s large operatic set pieces. Those with a more seasoned understanding of the form will admire Wheeldon’s masterful structuring and nimble editing of an unwieldy play. And ballet aficionados who want to see exquisite dancers explore new emotional terrain will relish the theatrical demands placed on the leads.
Falling into that last category, I loved seeing the company’s new and emerging stars tackle roles that present dramatic, as opposed to technical, challenges.
As the paranoid Leontes, principal dancer Ben Rudisin infuses Wheeldon’s expressionistic choreography with inchoate rage and self-hatred, offering a convincing physicalization of a complex character. Shakespeare’s text compares jealousy to a skulking spider; Rudisin embodies this image to creepy effect. His paranoia begins as a tense palsy in his fingers, before it seeps into his arms, chest and neck. It’s a motif that powerfully suggests how unwittingly we can be overtaken by dark feelings.
Tirion Law and Naoya Ebe in The Winter's Tale. Grouped among Shakespeare’s problem plays, The Winter’s Tale isn’t an obvious choice for a choreographer but Christopher Wheeldon tackles it nonetheless.Karolina Kuras/Supplied
The excellence of his performance is matched by that of second soloist Isabella Kinch, who presents a soulful and dignified Hermione. It’s a casting choice that lets us see more of Kinch’s talent and potential, following standout work in Procession earlier this month.
She dances with particular depth and beauty in her final solo and subsequent pas de deux when, after 16 years as a statue, Hermione suddenly comes to life. In this variation, Hermione has simple classical steps – a pure arabesque that seems to extend for miles. Kinch endows it with gravitas, which gives us the emotional resolution we’re looking for. It’s the work of a skilled performer.
Act Two in Bohemia is a little bright and treacly for my taste, with its pastel hues, folksy costumes and repetitive choreography. But the company is unfailingly polished and sharp. There are swift turning combinations and invigorating petit allegro from second soloist Erica Lall and corps de ballet dancer Albjon Gjorllaku. And principal dancer Tirion Law makes a lovely, ebullient Perdita, flowing through the steps with energy and easy grace.
This is despite some of Wheeldon’s clunky flourishes, such as a recurring flexed foot thrown in the way a novice writer might throw in a gratuitous obscenity. Some of the lifts in this section also seem weird for the sake of weirdness, particularly the final one in which Law is lifted in a crouched horizontal line by Naoya Ebe as Florizel, a pose that falls somewhere between a fetal position and touching her toes.
I found that Wheeldon’s choreography looked particularly two-dimensional on principal dancer Heather Ogden as Hermione’s lady-in-waiting, Paulina. I remember former principal dancer Xiao Nan Yu, who danced the role in previous productions, giving Paulina’s low arabesques and subdued poses a sense of kinetic poise and elegance, enriching the character with moral fortitude and dignity. But there’s something too simple and straight about Ogden’s interpretation, which makes the movement seem unfinished and stunts its ability to contribute to the story.
Erica Lall and Albjon Gjorllaku in Wheeldon's The Winter's Tale. The ballet has something for audiences of all stripes.Bruce Zinger/Supplied
Those who have been reading my reviews in The Globe for the past decade will know I keep a tally of violence against women – physical or sexual – in ballets old and new. While some of this is easier to forgive in productions created a century ago, it boggles my mind that contemporary dancemakers – Wheeldon, Christian Spuck, John Neumeier – add gendered violence to their ballets as casually as they would a pinch of salt.
I last reviewed The Winter’s Tale at its North American premiere in 2015 and hadn’t remembered the degree to which Leontes and his henchmen physically abuse the heavily pregnant Hermione, a plot point that’s entirely Wheeldon’s invention.
Maybe the fact that I’ve had two kids since then can explain why I found this episode almost unwatchable this time around. Either way, it’s somewhere between unimaginative and indefensible that these male choreographers (yes, they’re exclusively men) think that raping and beating women are the only choreographic ways to suggest conflict between the genders on stage.