Five stars for Royal Ballet’s spruced-up Cinderella — review

Missing from the Royal Ballet repertoire for more than a decade, Cinderella made a triumphant return on Monday in a handsome new production cast to the hilt and led with smiling grace by Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov.

Charles Perrault’s gentle 1697 retelling of the ancient story — no child abuse, no sawn-off toes — inspired numerous ballets to a variety of music, and in 1948 Frederick Ashton made his three-act masterpiece to the Prokofiev score that had premiered in Moscow only three years earlier. After years of what he called his “private lessons” watching the works of imperial ballet master Marius Petipa, Ashton was supersaturated with the classics and Cinderella poured out of him — he claimed to have written all three acts in only four weeks.

The Royal Ballet’s last Cinderella makeover in 2003 was an underwhelming compromise of mimsy sets and drippy costumes. The new production is far more successful. Tom Pye’s opening scenes are a study in shabby gentility, with a dilapidated drawing room giving on to the cracked glass wall of a fly-blown conservatory. As the Fairy Godmother (the crystalline Fumi Kaneko) introduces the four season fairies, the vaulted ceiling becomes a screen for Finn Ross’s projected découpage of flowers, fruits and foliage. Piece by piece, the real world is whisked away until only the stars, the Moon and the ominous clock face remain. The same sense of unreality suffuses the second act. The facade of the Prince’s palace — part Waddesdon Manor, part Château de Chambord — remains tantalisingly insubstantial, like a vast baroque doll’s house.

Costume designer Alexandra Byrne is no slave to colour schemes and only the 12 “Stars” — Ashton’s constant reminder of the passage of time — are tutu’d to match. Act one’s army of dancing masters and dressmakers sport random eye-popping shades while act two’s ball guests wear mix-and-match pastel tulle, like a trolley dash through a vintage boutique. This understated palette is mercilessly sabotaged by the Ugly Sisters in a riot of violet, viridian and candyfloss.

Drag was a simpler business in 1948 when Ashton and Robert Helpmann created the original sisters and the caricatures now tread a fine line between grotesquerie and misogyny. Some of this season’s 28 performances will be danced by women — an experiment not tried since the early 1960s — but Monday’s opening featured witty Gary Avis as the scene-stealing Helpmann sister and an unrecognisable Luca Acri as his “shy” sidekick. Carefully calibrated playing and the redemptive sweetness of Ashton’s scenario ensure that the comedy is broad but never vulgar. Cinderella forgives them and so must we.

Vadim Muntagirov somehow combines show-stopping virtuosity with utter self-effacement and Marianela Nuñez, with her quick feet, pliant torso and vari-speed pirouettes, remains dream casting for Ashton’s sweet-natured heroine. Her chains of turns unspool with dizzy inevitability, ever alert to the bittersweet score, strongly played by Koen Kessels and the orchestra. Prokofiev’s delicate diminuendo is lifted by the corny but always effective use of a glitter drop and the curtain falls on the couple as they climb Pye’s heavenly stairway towards the happiest of endings.

★★★★★

To May 3, with a live cinema relay on April 12, roh.org.uk