Rocking around the croc

When J M Barrie wrote Peter Pan, he gave us both a children's story about a boy who could fly, and a grown-up take on the terrors of old age. The pre-teens are wide-eyed at Peter's adventures, while parents mull the briefness of innocence and worry about that croc with a clock, surely the menacing ticktock of time that is about to snap us up.

Northern Ballet Theatre (NBT) has just made the book into a ballet and, as you would expect from the troupe that gave us A Christmas Carol and The Brontës, it is a sweet, gentle, family-friendly account of the Darlings and the boy that never grows old. If anything, David Nixon's balletic choreography and muted costumes are too gentle, too safe, and without any of the lime-sharp sense of danger lurking in Barrie's fairytale original.

Mama and Papa Darling are kind, Nana is loyal, the children are good, Hook is a fop, and the crocodile a giant prosthetic model with red flashing eyes that two men wear like a pantomime horse.

Admittedly, ballet is always going to have trouble accommodating a crocodile. Ditto, the tiny Tinker Bell. Should she be pre-filmed, a real dancer, or some sort of animated model? NBT's solution is to make her a minuscule puppet worked by an operator who walks around stage wearing a black all-in-one.

Neither croc nor Tink work: the fairy is too small, and her operator too distracting, while the croc is too big, bumping into scenery at every turn.

However, what works brilliantly is the wire-flying. Peter (Christian Broomhall), Wendy (Pippa Moore) and her brothers, John (Christopher Hinton-Lewis) and Michael (Sebastian Loe), zoom through the air, seamlessly picking up and dropping their wires, airborne one minute, ground-based the next. Broomhall's Peter is especially adept, skipping across the stars and tiptoeing along bedsteads with magical ease.

Choreographically, Nixon has produced neat, pleasing steps, while composer Stephen Warbeck has created a tuneful score, albeit one lacking in dramatic oomph. The fight scene, when Peter takes on the pirates, feels flat, and you could do with a stronger rhythmic punch during the Lost Boys' Indian dance in Act I.

Story ballets work best when the plot is pruned to the essentials, and you suspect NBT's Peter Pan could do with the secateurs. Although it should make sense of the action, the scene with the Neverbird in Act I only muddies it, while Mrs Darling's dream scene at the start of Act II slows everything down.

Indeed, several sections of the ballet seem glacial, with filler music and movement to cover set changes clanking away in the background. If Nixon tightened the action, and simplified the revolving set, he'd have another hit on his hands.

Until Sunday 10 April. Information: 0870 737 7737.

Northern Ballet Theatre: Peter Pan