Sparkling costumes, exquisite dancing, and enough fairy dust to enchant an audience of any age.
The last time I genuinely believed in magic, I was considerably shorter. An evening at the Royal Albert Hall has issued a formal correction.
Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s The Sleeping Beauty, revived here by English National Ballet, is not a production that asks for your suspension of disbelief so much as your complete and unconditional surrender. A devotee of the grand Russian tradition, MacMillan treats the ballet as its purest expression, stately, ceremonial and built around the waltz with the reverence of someone who considers it a moral position.
The Royal Albert Hall is a vast and slightly vertiginous stage for ballet, open in a way that proscenium arch venues are not, with the orchestra tucked behind a backdrop so enormous it could double as a feature wall. On it, Charlotte MacMillan’s projections shift between parchment-paper illustrations adorned with cherubs, a castle gleaming at Aurora’s christening, and the same castle crumbling to ruin as she sleeps for a hundred years.
Emma Hawes as Aurora is the kind of dancer who makes you forget you are watching technique and simply watch a person. Her Act I entrance in a pink tutu – which, in one of the evening’s most charming details, does not quite fall flat when she faints at the spinning wheel, because tutus, structurally speaking, have other ideas – is girlish and radiant. once senetece By the last act, Aurora and Prince Désiré are paired in gold that matches almost conspiratorially, and Hawes, regal, luminous, somehow making the Royal Albert Hall feel intimate, caps it all with a fish dive that alone is worth the ticket price.
James Streeter’s Carabosse is the evening’s great theatrical pleasure and its single act of rebellion against MacMillan’s period reverence, the evil fairy styled not in the courtly palette that surrounds her but as Queen Elizabeth I, complete with Elizabethan ruff and enormous ginger hair, radiating the energy of someone who was not invited to a party and has made it everyone else’s problem ever since. In a production that otherwise commits fully to its classical roots, the choice lands as both wit and wickedness. Her attendants slither accordingly.
The christening fairies are costumed in the kind of sequins that catch every available light and throw it back with interest, and Anri Sugiura’s Lilac Fairy is the standout among them, all tenderness and quiet authority, the kind of godmother worth having in your corner. The wedding scene brings its own pleasures: the Bluebird pas de deux from Katja Khaniukova and Rentaro Nakaaki, and a White Cat and Puss in Boots so charming they nearly steal the entire last act, which is saying something given what they are up against.
There are errors, a fumbled moment here, a hesitation there, enough to place this at four stars rather than five, but not enough to puncture the spell. Some people have been waiting a hundred years for this. It was worth it.
Sleeping Beauty runs at The Royal Albert Hall, London until 28th June. Tickets here.