A fairy-story ballet is not easy to get right. It must look wonderful, satisfying the tastes of adults and children alike; it must move logically from scene to scene; and it must touch the heart. If there isn’t a moment’s yearning silence as the final curtain comes down, the choreographer hasn’t done his or her job. Christopher Hampson’s Cinderella, for Scottish Ballet, scores highly by this reckoning. The piece is neatly constructed and dramatically satisfying, with virtue properly rewarded. Our heroine is Bethany Kingsley-Garner, a performer of unaffected charm and directness. She’s the antithesis of the flashy virtuosa, with an engaging smile and a restrained line that eloquently conveys Cinderella’s lack of pretension. Especially when compared to Sophie Laplane’s vulgar stepmother, and Sophie Martin and Eve Mutso’s tiresome stepsisters.
As a metaphor for Cinderella’s progress from grieving daughter to loving bride, Hampson has chosen the rose. Visually we see the motif everywhere. Cinderella’s mother is buried in a rose garden whose blooms come to life in a cleverly composed vision scene, with the corps enchanting in designer Tracy Grant-Lord’s pretty, stem-waisted tutus, and Araminta Wraith’s Fairy Godmother chic in Parisian pink and grey. Choreographically, Hampson gives us classicism with a romantic twist, in the Frederick Ashton mould. Kingsley-Garner uses her eyes, neck and shoulders to telling effect, Wraith’s dancing is spacious and benevolent, and the ensemble look serenely confident throughout.
The ballroom scene has more than a touch of magic about it too, with the female dancers in floaty pink and black illuminated by chandeliers which appear suspended in the starry sky. And if the men’s tailcoats incline the scene towards the Mecca ballroom rather than the Winter Palace end of the spectrum, the result is no less captivating. As the Prince, Christopher Harrison is a briskly capable dancer, and a thoughtful and assiduous partner. It’s a hard role to personalise, and technically, he doesn’t put a foot wrong. But he could be more expressive. A little more wonderingly love-struck in his dealings with Cinderella, and perhaps a little more startled at the antics of the stepsisters.
The stepsisters are a problem. The temptation in any production of Cinderella is to play them for laughs, but if they’re merely inane, as they are here, then they undercut the poignancy of Cinderella’s situation. No one could feel trapped or imprisoned by these two. Martin and Mutso are first-rate dancers, but here they crash about witlessly, doing all those things that are supposed to be so hilarious in a ballet context – sinking into splits by accident and pulling ooh-er faces, galumphing around with flexed feet (flexed feet – imagine!) – but aren’t. What makes the pair’s behaviour especially meaningless is that in the group dances, they’re as lissom and fluent as everyone else. Happily, Hampson rescues us with corps dancing of such gentle lyricism, and concluding scenes of such rose-pink rapturousness, that we forgive and forget. On the podium, conductor Richard Honner leads the orchestra through Prokofiev’s sublime score with sweeping assurance. All in all, magic.
