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Cinderella review, Theatre Royal, Newcastle: overlook the tacky sets and you may well have a ball

Minju Kang as Cinderella and Javier Torres as Prince Mikhail in Northern Ballet's Cinderella - Emma Kauldhar
Minju Kang as Cinderella and Javier Torres as Prince Mikhail in Northern Ballet's Cinderella - Emma Kauldhar

Mid-November is peak time for the perennial British complaint that Christmas seems to start earlier every year. However, few people would, surely, begrudge Northern Ballet its decision to get in early with this revival of its 2013 version of Cinderella.

Choreographed by the company’s artistic director David Nixon, with an original musical score by Philip Feeney, this adaptation of the famous fairy-tale dances a careful line between tradition and innovation. As in any version of the well-loved folk story, poor Cinders finds herself all but enslaved by her stepmother, yet magically transported to the Prince’s grand ball, where, fatefully, she leaves a glass slipper (or, in this case, a sparkling ballet shoe) behind.

However, other parts of Nixon’s narrative are less conventional. For a start, Cinderella’s plight is caused not by her father’s fecklessness and naivety, but by his comical death in a freak hunting accident. Nor is Cinders’s transformation from scullery maid to belle of the ball accomplished by a fairy godmother dressed like the late Dame Barbara Cartland. Rather, her enchanted rescuer is a paternalistic magician who (being danced, like our heroine’s father, Count Serbrenska, by the ever-impressive Mlindi Kulashe) seems very much like the ghost of her dead dad.

Given the House of Romanov’s less-than-modest sense of itself, Nixon’s choice of imperial Russia (complete, in the famous soirée scene, with a Fabergé-style ballroom) is perfectly reasonable. It’s just a pity that set designer Duncan Hayler’s offerings are so frustratingly inconsistent.

The splendid royal ballroom aside, a jagged polythene representation of a winter landscape looks like it’s been borrowed from a low-budget pantomime. The less said about the scene in which the word “Cinders” flashes in garish red lights, the better.

Martha Leebolt in Northern Ballet's Cinderella - Credit: Emma Kauldhar 
Martha Leebolt in Northern Ballet's Cinderella Credit: Emma Kauldhar

Although Feeney’s often restrained score cries out for a more symphonic treatment at key moments, Nixon’s costume designs hit the spot perfectly: they’re consistently beautiful, from the headscarfed peasant women to the strutting nobility. Meanwhile, the company dance beautifully, with Abigail Prudames (as Cinderella) and Sarah Chun (as her ultimately less-than-evil stepmother) excellently dynamic and emotive. The finest dancing is reserved for the ballroom scene, in which Nixon’s ballet comes closest to capturing the story’s sense of magic.

At Theatre Royal, Newcastle until Nov 16 (08448 11 21 21), then touring until June 6, 2020: northernballet.com