Review: Cinderella with Birmingham Royal Ballet – a company on glittering, reenergised form

Carlos Acosta‘s Birmingham Royal Ballet [BRB] heralds itself as “one of the world’s great touring ballet companies,” dancing 100 shows each year. Hmm! That is some 50 performances shy of those programmed by Peter Wright, the company’s founder, in his valedictory season 30 years ago.

The touring footprint has shrunk too. Gone are Bradford, Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff, Leeds, Eastbourne, Canterbury, Oxford, Norwich … Manchester even. The repertoire performed is similarly smaller. Thirty years ago, BRB performed six times per week at any venue with a change of programme – eight with three changes of rep when I first experienced the company’s alma mater in Manchester 50 years ago – but now?

BRB performs four times at max each week on tour – no way to develop dancers’ careers and interpretive skills or to build audiences for ballet. Diminished arts’ funding is blighting all dance and opera companies in the United Kingdom, against the ever-increasing competition for discretionary spending among the cacophony of virtual and live leisure choices.

In 2019, when a new director for BRB was sought following David Bintley‘s resignation after 24 years in charge that led to Acosta’s appointment, Peter Wright told me that he worried whether the company would exist in five years. A year beyond that prognosis and what do we have? A visit to draughty, unlovely Salford Quays to see Bintley’s Cinderella, performed to a packed house of enthusiastic families who roared their approval of a company with its dramatic credentials intact and its dancing on glittering, reenergised form.

Bintley was encouraged to tackle Cinderella in 2010 by his then chief executive who considered it bankable at the box office. Bintley himself was reluctant, having grown up with and performed in the 1940s’ version made by Frederick Ashton. Bintley asked himself if had he anything different to say.

The answer? Bintley’s Cinderella is a wonderful homage to Ashton – The Royal Ballet’s founder choreographer – but the way in which this Cinderella is told is typical of Bintley’s dramatic and theatrical flair.

The context and pace are set as we begin at the grave of Cinderella’s mother, against a glowering grey sky, think the Brontës and the wind wuthering, recognisably the work of designer John Macfarlane. The stepmother claims Cinderella’s father, whom we never see again. In the kitchen, Cinderella’s stepsisters are vicious, sharply danced and characterised by Tori Forsyth-Heckin and Olivia Chang Clarke. Their spiteful antics are ignored by their mother, an impervious Laëtitia Lo Sardo, looking imperial in the gowns designed for her by Macfarlane.

Everybody knows Cinderella for her lost slipper. Bintley puts it centre stage. Left alone in the kitchen, a barefoot Cinders – here principal Yaoqian Shang whose acting as well as dancing really registered – finds her mother’s jewelled slippers and dreams of the ball to which she is not invited. As the act moves to its climax, Cinderella gives the slippers to a mysterious barefoot beggar woman, who here becomes the embodiment of her mother. Shoes wittily reappear at the beginning of the third act – a pyramid of discarded ones – as women try to fit the lost shoe that the prince found as Cinderella fled the ball.

The seasons’ fairies (Reina Fuchigami, Yuki Sigiura, Rosanna Ely, Alisa Garkavenko) all had great precision and elegance. How the winter fairy descended into the splits at the close of her variation was fun, as if in a skating tumble, (perhaps) a nod to Ashton’s Les Patineurs. The constellation stars had amplitude in their kaleidoscopic patterns. Bintley makes this scene feel less rushed than with Ashton.

The lizards and frog who facilitate the transformation of the pumpkin into Cinderella’s coach is a sequence that does not cohere. A beautiful silver filigree coach appears – Shang looked radiant as she sat in it, Cinders shall go to the ball – but the coach didn’t move, so the act ended on rather a flat note.

The ballroom appears suspended in time, glimpsed behind a scrim, shades of The Sleeping Beauty. Chief delight here are the costumes for the courtiers, clad in maroons and black, who ebb and flow through Bintley’s cornucopia of patterns. The ballroom is presided over by Gabriel Anderson’s major domo – an excellent performance – as he is teased by the stepsisters, who play this act for laughs as they chase any man they can. The thin sister attempts to pole dance on the major domo’s staff, the plump one chases a waiter carrying pink buns… you get the idea.

The prince gets plenty of stage time compared to some other versions. First soloist Riku Ito was energetic, crisp, with impressive leaps. His four friends partner as Cinderella arrives at the ball, recalling Ashton’s Scènes de ballet. Shang looked tentative as she descended the ballroom staircase and in the complex lifts and manoeuvres in the pas de deux that Bintley gives the couple, but when Ito nailed a high, one-armed, Bolshoi style lift, his beaming smile said it all. Cinderella’s solo, however well Shang delivered the choreography, was another moment that did not quite work – you could imagine Bintley wondering, ‘what am I going to do here that is NOT Ashton?’

Macfarlane said to me once that there is one scene that is the way in for any work he designs. For Liam Scarlett‘s Frankenstein that was the operating theatre, for Cinderella it is the massive, looming midnight clock that is assembled, its cogs and wheels matching the menace of Sergei Prokofiev’s score and Bintley’s ticking movements. A dramatic ending as Cinderella jumps through the clock into a void of billowing smoke.

The third act is always low key, more jinks from the sisters and the shoe trying but in a nice act of symmetry Bintley brings back the stars who move gently in their firmament as Cinderella, barefoot again, performs a serene duet with her prince. Macfarlane’s golden sun beckons as the couple walk to the happy ever after.

The tour continues to Sunderland, Bristol, Plymouth and Japan. See Cinderella: UK and International Tour | Birmingham Royal Ballet

Paul Arrowsmith Guest Author

Paul Arrowsmith has been watching dance for 45 years after Peter Wright’s Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet was his baptism in dance in the UK. He wrote for Dancing Times between 2010-22, reporting from China, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark, along the way interviewing Alessandra Ferri, Akram Khan and Miyako Yoshida among many. He has a particular interest in design for dance and has profiled the work of Natalia Goncharova, Jürgen Rose, John Macfarlane and Anthony McDonald. Paul collaborated with Sir Peter Wright on his memoires Wrights & Wrongs and in 2016 was programme consultant for the BBC documentary, The Ballet Master: Sir Peter Wright at 90.