The Sleeping Beauty review: Lovely dancing, shame about the staging ★★★

Sir Kenneth MacMillan will be best remembered for creating some of the most dramatic ballets of the last century. Romeo and Juliet, Manon and Mayerling stand out as his great three-act masterpieces, alongside many shorter works which are currently danced by companies around the world. Yet his ballets, for all their passion and sensuality, were grounded in classicism: he had trained in classical ballet and the 19th century Petipa repertoire was familiar to him. So it should really come as no surprise then, that in 1987 he staged his own version of The Sleeping Beauty, reworking Petipa’s original tour de force.

The English National Ballet is currently the only company performing this version and the Royal Albert Hall’s large stage (at one end of the arena – it is not danced in the round) gives the company ample space to bring to life MacMillan’s interpretation of the famous fairy tale. Unfortunately, without the traditional proscenium arch and wings, this brings its own problems: Aurora has to make her famously tricky entrance down numerous steps at the side of the auditorium; dancers either manage these steps or disappear into doors cut into the backcloth and the few props that are used have to be placed onto the stage by stagehands. Dancers just make their exits up these side stairs at the end of Act I – they do not fall asleep as Tchaikovsky’s music commands them to with that powerful cymbal crash.

Filmed projections allow constant changes to the backcloth – but surely more can be made of the forest growing as the Lilac Fairy weaves her magic? I found the repetitive writing on the backcloth, introducing each act irritating rather than informative – we can read a programme, after all.

Costumes, by Nicholas Georgiadis (MacMillan’s longtime collaborator) are overly fussy for the courtiers – the Act II dancers look like someone has vomited sequins over their outfits – but all the tutus are very pretty. In this production, Carabosse is danced by a man – the ever reliable James Streeter, dressed up to look like an enraged Elizabeth I in a large neck ruff and red wig.