No one watches The Sleeping Beauty for the plot. “They dance, they fall asleep, they dance again,” was how one critic summed up the 1890 premiere in St Petersburg.
It isn’t the fairy tale story that captured subsequent generations, but Tchaikovsky’s majestic score and the intricate geometry of Marius Petipa’s choreography (he worked out patterns for his group dances with papier mâché dolls). Productions must find meaning beyond technical accomplishment, but at the Royal Ballet it remains thoroughly pretty, but unmotivated – decorous but often fearsomely dull.
I find it a tough ballet to love, although woven into the company’s fabric. Londoners fell upon it with heartfelt gratitude when it reopened the Royal Opera House in 1946. After wartime years of grim monochrome and powdered egg, the tale of a world pulled back from the brink of disaster must have struck a chord, and its shimmering colours would have been a balm.
But that was then; our current age of austerity has a different vibe. We too might crave a fable of a better world – but not one mired in antique hierarchies. The designs, developed from Oliver Messel’s 1946 wonders, are testaments to lost theatrical arts of gauze and backdrop, but the effect is almost oppressively tasteful.
More damagingly, the action unfolds without intent. Where are we: a healthy monarchy or a regime ripe for toppling? These vapid monarchs and politely skippy courtiers give no clue. Only Kristen McNally’s wicked fairy raises the temperature, visibly seething at being excluded from the royal christening, delivering her curse with satiric glee.
The ballet’s heroine was played on opening night by Marianela Nuñez, bringing a radiant independence to young Aurora. Yet even she has a muted sense of character, while the court barely responds to her deathlike swoon or the Lilac Fairy’s response: sending everyone to sleep for a century. Hardly surprising in a show that skews soporific.
Performances are precise and diligent, but you search for some dynamism amid the sense of duty. Koen Kessels’ orchestra gives the score some welly and there’s a crackle in Yuhui Choe’s spiky, pliant fairy and Calvin Richardson’s zippy jumps, while Mica Bradbury and Leo Dixon slink and bristle through their cat duet.
Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov as her prince are artists of glorious security, making the most arduous balances or scissor jumps feel like a stroll in the park. You can’t help to smile at each dauntless dive, but their fireworks only arrive nearly three hours into the evening.
It may be mean to carp at a popular production. But at a moment when London’s theatres are arguing back at classic plays – like the National Theatre’s Othello or the Almeida’s Streetcar Named Desire – it’s dismaying that ballet companies treat their masterworks as museum pieces.
