The London Colesium - 3rd - 14th December 2008 

The English National Ballet features three classic ballets in its Christmas season: perennial Christmas appointment The Nutcracker, Jules Massenet’s Manon and classic fairytale The Sleeping Beauty. Tchaikovsky purportedly considered the latter his best balletic work, though this production, choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan, only partially serves to fulfil that claim. The design, though a feast of sumptuous muted metallic colours, is firmly entrenched in the eighteenth century and lacking in relatable visual cues for a modern audience.

The choreography of many of the corps numbers offers nothing overly fresh or engaging, but the solo performances are where The Sleeping Beauty becomes more enchanting. There are moments of impressive virtuosity from principal dancer Fernanda Oliveira as Aurora - her dance with the Princes in Act I is flirtatious, sprightly and almost entirely en pointe. Puss in Boots and the White Cat also insert a dose of humour into the closing Act with a coquettish performance, full of quirky feline character.

Fittingly for a fairytale, the real star is the baddie, Carbosse (André Portásio). Entering in a flurry of movement atop a carriage drawn by four bald-headed minions, Carbosse appears as a demonic Queen Elizabeth I look-a-like, complete with glittery red eye make-up. Until her arrival the choreography is fairly simple, but as soon as she leaps from her carriage the stage is infected with an electric energy. Like she’s stepped out of a different ballet, she’s a whirl of pantomimesque mime with the odd burst of hip-hop. She is both terrifying and enthralling.

Carbosse does so much to raise the energy of the production that the final two acts suffer from a lack of her. The vision that Prince Désiré has of Aurora in Act III has a satisfactory dream-like quality, making good use of the layered forest set, but it’s somehow missing a sense of magic; when he finally kisses Aurora awake, the lighting from a single spotlight feels rather anticlimactic.

 The Sleeping Beauty’s main hurdle is the far more inventive production of The Nutcracker running alongside it. Whereas the latter production benefits enormously from the energy and wit of Gerald Scarfe’s design and the staging it encourages, proving how even the traditional ballets can be modern and exciting, The Sleeping Beauty feels like a ballet of a bygone era.

 By Liz Evans – December 2008