If one quality characterises Christopher Wheeldon’s career – which ranges from the Royal Ballet to Broadway and many points in between – it is his desire to create work that audiences can lose themselves in. As someone who grew up in rural England and fell in love with dance completely out of the blue, watching Frederick Ashton’s chickens in a television screening of La Fille Mal Gardée, he has a contagious delight in the wonder of it all.
His Cinderella, restaged in the round for English National Ballet’s season in the unforgiving arena of the Royal Albert Hall, is a case in point. Wheeldon’s intelligence and invention combine to make a story that will effortlessly entrance, rewarding on a grand and an intimate scale.
One innovation is to work hard on Cinderella’s backstory. This not only makes sensitive use of the melancholy themes in Prokofiev’s score – beautifully played by the ENB Philharmonic, conducted by Gavin Sutherland. It also, as it shows her visiting her mother’s grave as a child with her father (James Streeter), and then meeting her new stepfamily, offers a reason to invest in her happiness.
That family is properly delineated too. Fernanda Oliveira’s Edwina is grumpily grasping, Katja Khaniukova’s Clementine more tentative, more deserving of her own happy ending, while Sarah Kundi makes the most of stepmother Hortensia’s cruelty – and of her embarrassing drunken solo.
Prince Guillaume’s role-swapping with his friend Benjamin (vividly danced by Ken Saruhashi) means that he encounters Cinderella in her kitchen, when he is apparently a nobody, and her kindness comes from the goodness of her heart. All of this detail is faithfully communicated while at the same time the production – designed by Julian Crouch, lit by Natasha Katz and with puppets by Basil Twist and projections by Daniel Brodie – revels in transformative effects.
Great swags of cloth at the back of the arena pull up into a tree; dancers with potato heads and bird costumes become the creatures of the forest; a ream of silk and a set of wheels is the coach that whisks Cinderella to the ball. At the same time, Wheeldon marshals ranks of dancers into intricate patterns, moving in and out of the central story like a camera shifting focus.
At the centre of its gaze are Erina Takahashi’s delicate Cinderella, filling the space with solos of deep longing. She seems slightly more comfortable alone than when partnered by Francesco Gabriele Frola’s Guillaume, whose jumps carve perfectly executed arcs, but in the final pas de deux their mutual happiness is tenderly conveyed.
