Sleeping Beauty sets the bar impossibly high at the Royal Opera House

Marianela Núñez’s former husband (and Prince) Thiago Soares famously proposed on stage after a performance of The Sleeping Beauty. You can see how he might after her triumphant performance in the Royal Ballet’s latest revival in London.

The Argentine star has been dancing Princess Aurora at Covent Garden since 2003. Most dancers eventually come up against the cruel ballerina biorhythm whereby technique declines just as understanding and artistry reach their peak, but Núñez, now 40, continues to defy this trend. Her Aurora displays all the fairy gifts: the embodiment of grace, proportion and musicality delivered with a unique blend of grandeur and gladness, in joyous harmony with Koen Kessels and the orchestra.

The Act One: Rose Adagio in which the un-pricked Princess holds her balance (and her nerve) as she greets four suitors in turn can sometimes seem like stuntwork — the former Times critic John Percival dubbed it “the Becher’s Brook of ballet” — but for Núñez that succession of promenades simply allows us to admire her crystalline attitude from every possible angle.

Ninette de Valois first mounted Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty for her fledgling company in 1939 but the game-changer came with the sumptuous postwar staging designed by Oliver Messel. Other versions came and went but it was to this 1946 comfort blanket that the Royal Ballet returned when it set its heart on a new production in 2006.

Peter Farmer’s 2006 tweaks to Messel’s sets and costumes were only partially successful. His gliding backcloths for the Act Two panorama were a triumph but his watercolour costumes diluted the original effect. Happily, Messel’s more assertive oil pastel tones have crept back with each revival. This storybook palette is intensified by the spring sunshine of Mark Jonathan’s lighting, which makes the colours sing and guides the eye around each Watteau-esque tableau. In Act Two his clever handling of the enchanted forest gauzes allows Kristen McNally’s Carabosse and her henchman to manifest at will like Pepper’s ghosts.

Monday’s ensembles were tightly drilled. Isabella Gasparini was a pin-sharp Fairy of the Enchanted Garden and Claire Calvert luxuriated in the fiendish Fairy of the Woodland Glade variation, punctuating each phrase with freeze-frame arabesques. Fumi Kaneko, who also dances Aurora later this month, was a flawless Lilac Fairy, the benign presence whose kindly interventions diffuse the bad fairy’s minor-key malice and bring about the very happiest of endings.

Núñez’s sheer delight in showing us the steps is matched by Vadim Muntagirov’s noble, heartfelt Prince Florimund. His Vision Scene soliloquy was a perfect blend of virtuosity and weltschmerz. Tellingly, there was no applause for this miraculous adagio. The audience was simply too caught up in the moment to register its delight. Muntagirov’s variation in the grand pas de deux combined elegant manners with sublime classical technique: tight chaîné turns mapping the stage, every jump landed in fastidious fifth position. The coda was a study in synchronicity, two artists dancing as one. There are many fine casts scheduled for this long run of Beauties but Núñez and Muntagirov have set the bar almost impossibly high.

★★★★★ 

To June 6, roh.org.uk