In her hair-band and pastel party frock (and lumbered, what's more, with decidedly fat legs), she is out of the running in the romantic stakes Her trendy elder sister has all the fun. This production, if it has a serious purpose, homes in on the anxieties of puberty, using the original Hoffmann story with its darker resonances rather than the familiar sugared-up plot devised by Petipa.The obvious danger in altering the story is that the audience gets lost, and Morris's version doesn't help by deserting the linear in favour of a Jungian flinging together of dream images. Instead of travelling to Sweetieland with her nutcracker prince, Marie gets a bedtime story from Dr Drosselmeyer, the toymaker - a complicated tale about a baby princess, disfigured in her cot by a vengeful rat, and eventually restored to beauty by the suitor who succeeds in cracking the Hard Nut.Drosselmeyer's tale of travelling the world in search of this thing neatly introduces the national dances of Act II - a high point of colour and fun - but leaves the heroine entirely out of the picture until she butts in to declare her love for the nutcracker, and performs the "Sugar Plum Fairy" number as a shyly flirtatious come-on. Morris is masterly in charting such delicacies of Tchaik- ovsky's score, but fudges the big moments, which cry out for soaring figurations that are simply outside his vocabulary, eclectic though it is.For wit and flair The Hard Nut has cracked it; in terms of dance it is disappointingly slight. One exception is Morris's treatment of the snowflake dance that ends Act I. Disney's animators could not have conceived a sequence more graphically explicit of the score, with streams of silver-clad figures criss- crossing the stage spraying fistfuls of powdery snow at every perfectly timed leap.The expectation of seeing dancers dancing was realistically lower at the Edinburgh Playhouse for Nelken (Carnations) by Pina Bausch, the only living choreographer who can justifiably claim (if she weren't so modest) to have influenced a generation of important European theatre directors. The pre- publicity was irresistible: a stage carpeted with real flowers, stuntmen, snarling Alsatian dogs .. The event was both less and more than expected.

Bausch's images have a way of repeatedly sneaking up on your consciousness, naggingly full of new relevances and meanings.Nelken - first performed in 1962 - is about power and fragility, dominance and submission. The permanent presence of thousands of pale pink carnations, not scattered but actually springing up from the stage, imbues every scene with ineffable tenderness and, on a more practical level, makes the performers tread very carefully. The piece melds dialogue, psycho-games and fatiguingly repetitive movement into surreal snatches of dream, or nightmare. In Bausch's hands men in silky frocks don't look silly, but vulnerable; hunky men pratfalling onto a table isn't funny, it's menacing; a child's game of grandmother's footsteps turns to giant political metaphor, and Gershwin's song, "The Man I Love" becomes a hymn to the human soul when performed in deadpan sign language.At one point, exasperated, a performer addresses the audience "What is it you want, then? You want dance?" And he obligingly dashes off a circuit of whipping turns and some fiendish entrechats. Funnily enough, we realise with a jolt, real dance is the very last thing we want.. IT'S NOT difficult to work out the logic behind Peter Zadek's decision to float The Merchant of Venice on the open market. By setting his production for the Berliner Ensemble in the glass-panelled courtyard of a corporate building, and replacing Venetian traders with FT-toting, Armani-suited city dealers, he means to give Shakespeare's most difficult play a razor-sharp contemporary edge.

We are presented with a Shylock who is fully assimilated into the malicious gentile commercial world around him: "Hath not a Jew blue eyes, blond hair and a mobile phone?" might have been a more fitting epigram for conspicuously un-Jewish actor Gert Voss's hybrid creation. The character's religious identity is subordinated to his financial muscle: the wager with Antonio is joyously undertaken in the spirit of a Nick Leeson commercial venture, with both men revelling in the resulting hot rush of adrenalin. But as so often seems to be the case - Zadek, the son of Jewish fugitives who settled seamlessly into rural Wales, probably knows this all too well - retribution comes in the form of the next generation. Jessica now betrays her father because of the family's cultural disorientation. At the end of the play, he is not the victim of Christian viciousness, but of the denial of his Jewishness. These days assimilation is a cultural crime second only to fascist collaboration.All this might be wonderful, radiantly radical stuff - if it worked dramatically. Zadek's production is emaciated and empty, relying far too often on intellectual signposts and inference that make little mark on Shakespeare's familiar anti-semitic rant.