Bourne again, a dark and perfect beauty
Sleeping Beauty New Adventures (Theatre Royal, Glasgow) Glorious production, dazzling princess
ONCE upon a time, a beautiful princess pricked her finger on the sharpest thorn of a black rose – and all Hell was visited upon the land. Yes, it’s Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures again, with another reimagining of one of the great glories of classical ballet.
It is, after all, what he does best – and has been doing for the past quarter of a century.
Bourne has created a new genre in British (and international) dance by reinterpreting the great works – most famously for his now legendary male swans and cygnets in his mid-Nineties production of Swan Lake.
But he has done similar things with Nutcracker and Carmen – not forgetting Highland Fling, his gloriously grim version of La Sylphide, the Scottish Ballet, set in contemporary Glasgow.
The timing has worked for his Sleeping Beauty, with the birth of his own dance company in 1990 neatly enabling him to set the start exactly 100 years earlier in 1890 – the year of the premiere of Tchaikovsky and Petipa’s classic version in St Petersburg.
The joy over Princess Aurora’s birth, however, is clouded by the curse of Carabosse, the Dark Fairy. Twenty-one years later, at Aurora’s coming of age, her terrible revenge begins to unfold with the letting of virgin blood – bringing with it a century of sleep.
It is another happy coincidence for Bourne that this can take place in that last great, gilded, golden summer of Edwardiana, before the old order was swept away.
As ever, Bourne’s recreation of the once familiar sees the addition of new characters to the original story. Some might even say he sails dangerously close to the taking of liberties.
Here, we not only have the Dark Fairy Carabosse, but her even darker son Caradoc.
Dancing both roles, Tom Clark brought a truly chilling malevolence to the stage.
He was cold, heartless and implacable in his pursuit of his mother’s twisted revenge – and those were only his good points.
Another Bourne invention is the character of Leo, the royal gamekeeper who wins Aurora’s heart, bringing with it inevitable echoes of Lady Chatterley. In this role, Dominic North was more than adequate.
The problem – and it was fairly central to the production – was that he was totally, utterly, completely outshone by his Aurora.
Australian dancer Ashley Shaw was simply magnificent as the princess, as fair and radiant a maiden as even Edgar Allan Poe’s fevered imagination could ever have conceived. She dominated her every second on the stage, her perfect line unchanged from a slightly coquettish innocence through to the darkness of impending death.
It was the lack of any remotely equal balance between her and North that made for a sense of slight dissatisfaction. Had the gamekeeper measured up to his princess, this would have been a truly memorable production.
The supporting cast was uniformly excellent, the unsettlingly vampiric fairies bringing a true chill to proceedings. A word of praise is also due the puppeteers for their amazing creation of the baby Aurora.
But a word of criticism. It was unfitting to see this production danced to a taped score. This company deserves a live orchestra – as, indeed, does the Theatre Royal audience.
That aside, this Sleeping Beauty is a sumptuously glorious production – with a truly perfect princess. And some of them even lived happily (n)ever after.
Sleeping Beauty, Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures, Theatre Royal, Glasgow, today and tomorrow.