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.
