All you need is love | 16 July 2015

What could induce a grown-up, rational, childless person to go to see the ballet of Cinderella? You’ll expect to cringe at the panto comedy; on the other hand, you do not want to see verismo child-abuse and uglies-baiting. So what’s left for modern eyes?

Two things: the Prokofiev score — as magical a charmer as Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker — which plays with the contrasts of grotesque and beautiful, misery and hopefulness, and glistens with fairy dust in the right places. The overture melts the heart, the waltzes make you want to dance up into the sky. The sweetness of the final bars does that nearly impossible thing in music of expressing ‘and they lived happily ever after’ in a sigh of quiet relief after all the fuss and pother with sisters, shoes and all.

The other key thing is the nature of the fairy tale itself: Cinderella is about love, and about believing in love. All other classical ballets complicate the subject with egotism or lust or national duty. Cinderella is about a girl deserving love, and the boy who loves her doing everything it takes to find her. I wonder if any other theatrical art form lets you simply sit and contemplate the perfection of this idea.

I wish that Christopher Wheeldon had just done magic and meltingly loving choreography in his new version for Dutch National Ballet, and put his eager brain on hold. Blow the whole-page synopsis of the backstories to the traumatic bereavement of Cinderella and the misfit boy prince and Cinderella’s misunderstood sister and the beggar who is actually the prince who’s swapped places with his valet, etc. Truly there is merit in the great Sylvie Guillem’s synoptic style of most ballets as either ‘She dies’ or ‘They get married’.