The Sleeping Beauty
Birmingham Royal Ballet
New Theatre, 28 Mar-1 Apr 2006

This is an outstanding production by the Birmingham Royal Ballet. You have to see this. It is astonishing. It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes. I speak as a person who has not cared for many ballets on the grounds that they are pretty dull after the first ten minutes. But this is so wonderful that three hours whizzed past before I was at all aware of it – I couldn’t believe the time when it was over. The impact of the curtain going up was immediate and sustained – it flooded your mind with a delicious, sensuous, sumptuous eighteenth-century world of ravishing spectacle and glamour. If I ever get to live in a castle I want that set-designer to come and design its rooms. The palace was a perfect symphony of gold, black, ivory and cream, with accents varying from deep burgundy through rich crimson to subtler terracottas and floral pinks. The costumes were staggeringly beautiful – full-wigged, full-coated gentlemen and gloriously full-skirted ladies, an Enlightenment extravaganza that just slipped over the edge into decadence. From every cuff and hem embroidery was encrusted and jewels winked and glittered. The dancers were all exquisitely beautiful, the girls especially with their Russian-style crown head-dresses. The dancing was wondrous, seeming to defy the laws of motion – the men in particular leaped higher than humanly possible outside an Olympic stadium, and seemed to float like thistledown for a moment before coming back down; and there were no distressing thuds as they landed, which destroy the illusion in lesser productions. I think the principal dancers swap the lead roles, but tonight I can say that Nao Sakuma was an exquisitely graceful Princess Aurora, Iain Mackay a tall and handsome yet somehow touchingly naïve and vulnerable Prince Florimund, and Silvia Jimenez a magisterial as well as ethereal Lilac Fairy; but for me the whole thing was lifted from good to great by the performance of Marion Tait as the Fairy Carabosse. Her every appearance, accompanied by evil servants that looked like a horrible Dr Moureau experiment of mixing crows with monkeys, their faces obscured by sinister white Venetian masks, was wonderfully sinister and scary. Her thin, hatchet face with huge glittering eyes perfectly conveyed the ultimate misery of evil. And the music! You can easily forget in these days the visceral thrill of a live orchestra, when you feel the music all around you and coming up through the floor into your bones. Look, go. Just go.

Andrea Hopkins, 29.03.2006