Cinderella, Royal Ballet review - inspiring dancing, but not quite casting the desired spell

Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella? Prokofiev’s two great scores have provided the Royal Ballet with a pair of popular hits, though Macmillan’s R&J has probably been the bigger draw, its Capulets ball music sampled everywhere from TV commercials to Sunderland FC’s pre-match stadium anthem.

Cinderella, for me, is the better listen, but is it the better basis for a dance narrative? After a somewhat lacklustre opening night for its latest run at the Royal Opera House, it didn’t seem so. 

One problem is that, unlike R&J's, the score has a tendency to meander and doodle, stop and start, so that its striking motifs need clever dramaturgical underpinning to create a narrative of big climaxes and focal points. But Ashton’s ballet, despite the glorious steps he creates to underline each twist and turn of the music, doesn’t gel into a supremely magical experience, however much glitter is thrown at it. 

On opening night, things began rather gravely, the orchestra under Jonathan Lo, taking the overture’s melancholy melody down to a stately stroll. As the first scene unfolds, its unorthodoxies are laid bare. There is no corps, no general scene-setting, just a spacious bare kitchen tended by a young servant (Marianela Nuñez), whose only companion is her broomstick. Her father (Bennet Gartside) wanders in occasionally, but for company she has just her Step-Sisters (Gary Avis and Luca Acri). They immediately steal the show. It feels like setting out on the wrong foot.

Cinderella skitters on pointe around the space, avoiding the chairs and table at its centre, stopping to place her late mother’s portrait on the mantelpiece and have a good weep. But the plum choreography goes to the sisters, hilariously galloping around the stage in between Punch and Judy-esque squabbling as they prepare for the Prince’s ball with dance lessons and dress-fittings. Some of this is laugh-out-loud funny, especially Acri in the put-upon junior-partner role. As well as a face with the flexibility of a natural clown’s, the man can make even his feet funny, shod in lurid pink heeled shoes. Add to that a tiered costume of pink frills that makes him look like a demented tea-cosy and you have a comic performance Harpo Marx would have been proud of. 

Avis has the tougher role of being the more bossy and competitive sister; he has a string of baddies and bullies in his repertoire, and some of their forcefulness has ended up in this dame-role. You almost expect him to produce a rolling pin and start hitting out. But the two together are a joy to watch, especially in their Act 2 gallop round the stage, clutching oranges. Their timing is perfection, the shoe-throwing too. 

After a brief flurry of mimicking the sisters’ poor dancing, Cinderella next has to cede the stage to the Fairy Godmother (Mayara Magri) and her four season-fairies, who arrive with adorable small helpers and images of each fairy’s seasonal blooms projected onto the scenery. It’s gorgeous to look at (though the colours of the fairies tutus’ are too strident for my taste). Claire Calvert was rock-steady as the Winter fairy, the spins of Meaghan Grace Hinkis admirably off-kilter as wind-blown Autumn (pictured below). Meanwhile, Cinderella still has to stand by as, next, the snowflakes arrive for a set piece. 

Things are starting to warm up, however. The strains of the most stirring waltz Prokofiev ever penned swells the score for the first time, the pumpkin flies into the heavens and explodes in a shower of stars and finally the mice-drawn fairy coach appears, with Cinderella in a shimmering cloak that floats behind her. A giant clock is projected on the backdrop, summoned by a ticking motif in the score, ominously indicating the time limit on her big night out. 

Act 2’s ball scene should be counted on to provide more loveliness, but here too the temperature is oddly muted, constricted by the layout. The dancing takes place outside the palace and down some steps from a terrace — a design that relegates exits and entrances to the back of the stage and serves as a space-shrinker. There is a small (stopped) clock on the front of the palace, but that’s it for anything overtly thematic. 

And before Cinderella makes her grand entrance, we have more Step-Sister mummery with two Suitors, one movie-star handsome but clearly bored rigid (Lukas Bjorneboe Braendsrod), the other short and kitted out as Napoleon (Joshua Junker), both excellent. Plus the wonderful acrobatics of Taisuke Nakao as the Jester, in a bravura display of jumps and spins, miraculously high off the ground. 

Mercifully, the Prince (Reece Clarke) is every little girl’s idea of a handsome, noble partner, tender and attentive to Cinderella. But even he is robbed of the key moment when he finds her sparkling shoe after she flees, which goes almost unnoticed. He and Nunez give the act a perfect, graceful, deconstructed pas de deux, she with the faultless technique audiences righty love her for. But it’s now halfway through the piece and we are only just starting to engage with her as a character. 

The final moments ramp up the “fairy” quota, with projected snowflakes over the whole set, lights appearing out of the darkness, glitter falling from the flies. It should thrill and make you leave contented, but it feels more like box-ticking. A more treasurable takeaway is the choreography. Ashton’s fiendishly rigorous moves have to be projected with total control and confidence as everyday gestures that the body would normally make, and the dancers, on the whole, rose to the occasion.

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