Amid all the pink, sparkly tinsel of numerous Nutcrackers, Matthew Bourne’s vampiric fairies, with their dark eyes and dirty skirts, feel like a gloriously different Christmas outing.
A decade since it’s premiere, there’s no doubting just how clever and inquiring this rethinking of Sleeping Beauty is. Bourne has carefully gone through some of the challenges of the original balletic version and solved them in his own original ways. Problem one, in Act 1, is that the baby Aurora is the centre of attention but normally an inert doll in a crib.
That’s fixed by turning her into a cute puppet, surrounded by exasperated and exhausted attendants (particular credit to Daisy May Kemp, who turns her nanny into a fully rounded character with a flex of the neck and a roll of the eyes). What’s almost uncanny is the way that Ashley Shaw’s sumptuously danced grown-up Aurora seems to share the same free and uninhibited spirit of that little doll, falling in love with Andrew Monaghan’s lively, tender, gamekeeper Leo.
Bourne gives them the swooning glory of Tchaikovsky’s Rose Adagio as an impassioned but gentle love duet, and from that point on, with remarkable sensitivity, lets their complicated love affair expansively inhabit all the best sections of the score. In making Leo a vampire (a rather nice one), he explains how he survives 100 years, and in making him really love Aurora he gets rid of the difficulty of her falling for a prince who just kisses her and whom she doesn’t know.
The fun continues in the second act, which is normally just an excuse for a lot of pretty dancing, but here becomes a love rivalry between Leo and Caradoc, son of Carabosse, who starts out wanting revenge but then falls for Aurora himself. The action comes bang up to date in a stylish red and black nightclub, part of Lez Brotherston’s triumphantly effective gothic design.
The entire show, danced with vigour and careful detail by the New Adventures company, delights the mind and the heart. It really is a treat.
