Forget Disney; give me a dark fairytale, any day. I’ll take a deeply warped fable collected by the Brothers Grimm, livid with maiming or cannibalism – Freudian nightmares steeped in death and desire. They’re heady stuff.
The Grimm version of Cinderella is a shuddersome tale of parental neglect, toes sliced off and eyes pecked by birds. It also lies behind Christopher Wheeldon’s eye-catching ballet – premiered in Amsterdam in 2012, and more recently scaled up for English National Ballet’s regular summer season of productions performed in the round at the Royal Albert Hall.
