Christopher Wheeldon must have had moments when he identified strongly with the heroine of his latest work, given the chatter surrounding its creation. Alice is the first full-length story ballet to have been created at the Royal since 1995. And for Wheeldon the pressure has not only been to draw a big family audience to the work, but to maintain his own reputation as a grownup innovative choreographer. With Alice he's had to pull off the magic trick of being both populist and smart.It's a measure of his success, however, that watching the production lets us forget the hype. He and his team have created an Alice whose wit, speed and invention have lifted the whole story ballet genre into the 21st century.
First credit has to go to Joby Talbot's score. Driven by a huge percussion section, with weird and wayward textures, vividly descriptive melodies and a shimmer of emotion, this is music that is not only sophisticated, but also danceable.
But story ballets also need dance-friendly plots and in theory Lewis Carroll's Alice isn't, given its rambling structure and its talkative and surreally elusive cast of characters.
Wheeldon and his dramaturge Nicholas Wright have done some creative tweaking, adding a prologue, set in Oxford 1862, that creates human equivalents for the fantasy characters.
Alice becomes a 15-year-old whose love for Jack (the gardener's boy, or Knave of Hearts) gets him sacked. When Alice is lured down the rabbit hole by a tetchy White Rabbit it's Jack and her first love she's hurrying after.
This strategy doesn't overcome the episodic structure – if the ballet has a flaw it's an over long first act, in which the comedy and drama feel too sporadic.
But the second act steps into a dizzying higher gear and overall this is, by miles, the most successful Alice ballet I've seen. Bob Crowley's designs have a hallucinatory ingenuity, mixing hi-tech projection with puppetry and masks. And the visual invention is matched by Wheeldon's choreography.
Stylistically this is full of surprises: a tap dancing Mad Hatter, a preposterous Rose Adagio for the Queen of Hearts (with jam tarts) and the genius casting of Simon Russell Beale as the Duchess (right), dancing and acting a comic storm over her Hell's Kitchen of a sausage factory.
But the straight dancing is equally excellent – ranging from rosy, tender, love duets to a thrilling neoclassical ensemble for the deck of cards. And if this Alice scores as a genuine company ballet, it's a special triumph for Lauren Cuthbertson in the title role. Required to range from the hoydenish to the blithe, she rises to it with a performance that is alert, funny and deliciously un-twee. This Alice looks set to become a classic.
Royal Opera House (0207 304 4000). In rep until 15 March
