Sword dance

Since he took over five years ago as artistic director of Northern Ballet Theatre, David Nixon has won the company huge new audiences with highly dramatic, full evening story ballets based on well-known works like Madame Butterfly and Wuthering Heights.

To do this successfully takes top-class production, and, most of all, choreography that is interesting to watch, and at the same time able to convey deep emotions. This is David Nixon's forte. But The Three Musketeers sounds like a lighter work, and I asked him what attracted him to the subject.

"More than 30 years ago, David Drew a former Royal Ballet dancer with choreographic experience wanted to do the piece, and wrote a detailed scenario, but wasn't successful in getting it put on by the Royal Ballet. All these years later he came to see me and suggested I did it, and I thought cameraderie, swords, fighting, some love interest, lots of fun, this would make a good lighter piece for our company. It's still his scenario, but I had to ask him to put it on a bit of a diet, as it was originally conceived for a much larger company to perform in the Royal Opera House. We met several times to talk about how to develop it, but when that was settled I took it over. He s been watching rehearsals recently, but hasn't been involved in the actual creation of the piece."

Originally, David Drew had written to the composer, Sir Malcolm Arnold, who died last month, to ask whether he would write music for the ballet.

"He agreed to meet us," says Drew, "and so at 11am on February 6, 1975, we entered the ballroom of the Carlton Towers Hotel in Knightsbridge. It was deserted, save for the ebullient figure seated at a white grand piano, which bore four glasses and a bottle of champagne. He set up his tape-recorder, and for the next four increasingly sozzled hours, Malcolm improvised leitmotifs for the principal characters and the narrative incidents. We were as much inebriated by his genius as by his champagne!"

Has any of this survived to be used in David Nixon's production, I wondered.

"The one original piece that I have is a flute piece which I use when D'Artagnan and Constance (his love interest) are captive in Calais. Other than that it's a compilation of Arnold's wide span of music, anything from the movies - David Copperfield, The Roots of Heaven, Hobson's Choice - to the symphonies and quartets.

"Anthony Meredith, Arnold's biographer, loves dancing, and he compiled a selection of music that he thought to be appropriate, and then I worked very closely with our arranger and orchestrator John Longstaff, and we had to be a bit more ruthless, because when you get down to really making the piece things change, and you have to take the length of a scene into account - it's not the same as sitting down and having lunch and talking about it. I'm very happy with the music now, it works beautifully - some of it is film music and slightly over the top - it has that sweep - and the symphonies are very emotional.

"Usually, when I'm making a ballet, most of the music goes well, and then I have trouble with about 20 per cent of it, but with this piece I had no problems at all."

How close is the story to Alexandre Dumas' original?

" In essence, it's very close. The first part is really the introduction of D'Artagnan to the Musketeers, and then there's the business about the diamond necklace. Ballet has its early roots in the French court and so there are some masques and formal dances, and the story has been made to work for dancing. It's an adventure. There's plenty of swashbuckling, but there is emotional depth there too, for example, the character of Queen Anne and the love of D'Artagnan and Constance. Also the fight between the two women is very emotional, they have to be very aggressive, and it's very demanding."

Mainly though, it's men fighting men, and as a former fencer, I have often been disappointed by stage fights which amount to not much more that a rhythmic clicking of the opponents' blades. Swordplay is at the heart of this work and David Nixon has taken it reassuringly seriously.

"We've hired this fight director, Renny Krupinski, who has vast experience in arranging fights. It won't be up to the standard of real fencing, but it is much better than what I usually see dancers doing on the stage. The fights are really well constructed; there's some dance element to them, but they really are fights - they're quite dangerous, quite busy, and more complicated than usual.

"I've choreographed sword fights in my Peter Pan and my Romeo, and I know what steps to do, but I dont really know what to do with a fight, while Renny has a real vocabulary of fight movements in his head."

The Three Musketeers is at Milton Keynes Theatre from Tuesday till Saturday next week, with matinees on Thursday and Saturday. Box office: 0870 060 6652.