Ondine, Northern Ballet, at West Yorkshire Playhouse - Seven magazine review And yet, while big, rich companies like the Royal, Birmingham Royal, and English National Ballets will kick off their seasons with super-safe revivals of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, David Nixon's Northern Ballet boldly opened their autumn tour (to Dec 1) with the dark drama of a mortal man's doomed love for a deadly mermaid. The production, originally made by Nixon for Ballet du Rhin in 2006, had its UK premiere last week. The designer dressed Raise the Red Lantern for the National Ballet of China, and his work here shows the same mastery of colour and fabric with the water stripes draped in wired skirts that pool around the dancers" feet, letting them glide dalek-like across the floor. The stage pictures are exquisite and Nixon, who has an innate flair for blocking an ensemble, furnishes Kaplan's magical spaces with great skill. Northern Ballet may not be a premier league company but his choreography - particularly for the Act 3 wedding celebrations - makes no compromises, with densely written group displays and firecracker solos for young talents like Kevin Poeung. Handsome Tobias Batley makes easy, elegant work of the countless overhead lifts in his pas de deux with the sinuous Martha Leebolt. Nixon is careful to draw a distinction between these ecstatic duets and the hero's more earthbound duets with Beatrice (danced on pointe by Dreda Blow). Even Ashton, that most instinctively musical of choreographers, found Henze heavy-going: 'any tunes?" as he famously asked, while the composer was at work on the commission. Nixon modestly admits to being daunted by its complexity but his dances surf the score with great confidence, reflecting its ever-changing surface and the sudden scary shifts of mood and depth. A pity, then, that the performance should be danced to a recording, but with a 15 per cent budget cut, I guess something has to give. To Sept 15; www.wyp.org.uk