John Lanchbery

The winter nights may be drawing in and everyone is down with stinking colds as the civilised world inexorably disintegrates, but in La Fille mal gardée, it’s sunlit springtime and young love is busting out all over. Frederick Ashton’s bucolic masterpiece, revived by the Royal Ballet, manages to be both child-like in its innocence and wickedly sophisticated in what it demands of the dancers – it looks so artless, so easy, and it just isn’t. Of Ashton’s supreme genius in the devising of it all there can be no doubt, but John Lanchbery and Osbert Lancaster deserve credit too – Lanchbery’s pasticcio score is a chocolate box filled with toe-tapping