Distressingly vulgar: Royal Ballet’s Cinderella reviewed

Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling blocks – all of which the Royal Ballet’s new production throws into relief. Ashton isn’t altogether to blame: Prokofiev’s graphic score dictates an excessive amount of time given over to knockabout for the Ugly Sisters (mostly a matter of them bumping into each other) and a tiresome court jester. There’s nothing to be done with an inert third act, which in Ashton’s treatment merely recapitulates previous choreography and ends with a static tableau. The Prince has no personality whatsoever: he’s little more than a handsome porter.

Yet genius shines through. Created in 1948, in the wake of the flawless Symphonic Variations and Scènes de Ballet, Cinderella offers rich pickings: a title role that a succession of great ballerinas – Shearer, Fonteyn, Beriosova, Sibley – has inhabited with winsome charm; a series of exquisitely subtle variations representing the four seasons; and some superb neoclassical sequences for the corps, reflective of a fascination with Euclidean geometry. One has only to compare Nureyev’s or Ratmansky’s or Wheeldon’s versions to appreciate Ashton’s profound artistry.

 Over its 75-year life, Ashton’s Cinderella has received several redesigns as well as some choreographic tweaks. It remains a problem child, with protective parents. Ashton bequeathed the rights to the first Prince, Michael Somes, who in turn passed them to his widow Wendy Ellis, herself a Cinderella of note. Ellis Somes has mounted a number of stagings across the world since 1992 and has definite ideas about what and who she wants and doesn’t want: negotiating with her is a sensitive business.

Her previous production of Cinderella for the Royal Ballet was panned and revived only once. This time round she has collaborated with ballet master Gary Avis and a team of designers led by Tom Pye (sets) and Alexandra Byrne (costumes).