La Fille Mal Gardée review: A perfect antidote to the winter blues ★★★★

It may be cold and rainy outside, but inside the Royal Opera House the weather is warm and the skies are blue. After a gap of nine years, Frederick Ashton’s joyous interpretation of a sun-filled bucolic romp – where chickens dance, a maypole takes centre stage and a pony (yes, a live one) just about steals the show – is back.

Ashton created La Fille Mal Gardée for the Royal Ballet back in 1960 and it serves as a supreme example of the choreographer’s best work. The story – girl loves boy, her mother (always played in pantomime tradition by a man) opposes the match, love eventually conquers all – is hardly complex, but is danced with such exuberance it is hard not to be completely charmed by it all.

And Ashton has invented some tricky choreography for the lead dancers. At the performance I saw, Fumi Kaneko was Lise and Thomas Whitehead played Widow Simone, her cross-patch mother with a heart of gold. Whitehead emphasises the comedy in the role and performs the famous clog dance (you would instantly recognise the music even if you have never seen the ballet) with skill. He even went for a nice touch of improvisation, keeping entirely in character and lending a hand when the pony cart got tangled up with a frontcloth. Eventually the performance had to be stopped for a few minutes while technical issues were sorted out, but these things happen.

Kaneko’s Lise is full of fun and her dancing is razor-sharp, with swift footwork which is so typical of much of Ashton’s work. In Matthew Ball as Colas, her beloved, she has the ideal partner. His height gives him natural authority on stage and in each pas de deux he makes every lift look effortless. Even the famous “bum lift” near the end of Act One works beautifully and he has a wonderful sense of comic timing too, which comes to the fore in the mime scene.