MANY a different Swan has risen from the Lake. Why, even that ever-joyous Russian, Stalin, insisted on a happy-ever-after ending.

Northern Ballet Theatre artistic director David Nixon has not gone quite so far, retaining the patina of Petipa's original 19th century choreography of Tchaikovsky's melancholic music, but leaving his own deep and muddy imprint on the story.

Swan Lake has been relocated, lake, stock and barrel to New England in "the last summer of youth 1912", a languid and lazy place of flannel trousers and flowing skirts, swimming parties and gay old American football games by the lakeside reeds.

Everyone is happy and smiling in these closing chapters of the Belle Epoque, except for poor old Siegfried, sorry Anthony, who is adrift on his family estate.

Siegfried has had it tough in Swan Lake, burdened with myriad dysfunctional characteristics, from mummy trouble to drug fixation, from depression to repression of his homosexual feelings. Here he has been renamed Anthony, and in the words of Nixon: "Gone for me are sorcerers changing women to swans, princes who can't face responsibility and cold, sometimes evil mothers. Instead there is a tale of a dark, romantic young man, whose sexual awakenings destroy his friendships and lead him into the dangerous realm of his romantic nature".

Anthony (Jonathan Ollivier) has never got over his childhood experience of being pulled away from a swan carcass by his stern father (stiff Steven Wheeler, in an extraordinarily long stiff jacket).

The audience, already disorientated by the silly football game, may take a while to get over the experience of seeing a stuffed swan being tenderly held: unwittingly you tend to think of Orville or Rod Hull's Emu at such moments, no matter how pretty and Persil-white this dying bird looks.

Anyway, back to the story. Anthony has always had a thing for a swan that appears in the form of a woman, Odette (Keiko Amemori), but he has a thing too for Simon (Christopher Hinton-Lewis), and not only because they are the only two dandies whose summer sartorial taste stretches to waistcoats. Theirs is the love that cannot be spoken, and so Anthony marries Odilia (Victoria Lane Green), creating the classical construction of a mnage a trois.

However, that swan lady in the lake is troubling him too, and so like Ollivier's tormented Anthony, the story is torn this way and that, and it is difficult to feel any emotional attachment.

The corps de ballet's swan scenes are classically graceful, but feel imported from another age amid the modern, more muscular and agitated dancing of the leads. This production, a flop by Northern Ballet Theatre's standards, is as doomed as the Romantic age.

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Updated: 11:07 Thursday, February 19, 2004