SLEEPING BEAUTY was first staged by Charles Robinson Planché as an extravaganza in London in 1840 and has been a popular pantomime in Britain ever since.
There is always a choice: Tchaikovsky, live, and Maurice Petipa or Tchaikovsky, pre-recorded, and Matthew Bourne taking liberties with the score and nothing comparable to the rose adagio.
Bourne, master dance theatre showman, has been successfully reinventing the classics for a very long time. His great achievement, is that he has been able to win over audiences who wouldn’t normally go and see a ballet.
He labels his version of Sleeping Beauty, A Gothic Romance. Les Brotherston, his designer, delivers the spectacle, sometimes in creamy white and sometimes in blazing red. The mime is excellent.
Bourne’s Princess Aurora is born in 1890. She pricks her finger in 1911 and wakes up in 2011. Initially played by a rod-puppet, Aurora (Ashley Shaw) grows up to fall in love with a gamekeeper (Andrew Monaghan) called Leo.
The word “gamekeeper” instantly conjures up thoughts of Lady Chatterley and Mellors in the woodshed. But, be assured, this is family entertainment, and there is no sex before marriage. Instead, there is a lot of waltzing in the Edwardian era, which delays the storyline.
Everybody knows that Sleeping Beauty is woken with a kiss by a charming Prince. What is less known is that in some early versions of the fairy story, pre-Perrault (who sanitised everything) that the prince actually raped her.
Bourne comes up with a new twist and it is the ballet’s most surprising, dramatic and shocking moment. The Lilac Fairy, the King of the Fairies, is now Count Lilac (Dominic North), a vampire. (All the fairies are vampires.) It is Lilac who rapes Leo who struggles to free himself from his grasp. Lilac gives him a big Gothic and erotic bite.
The wicked Carabosse (Paris Fitzpatrick) dies in Bourne’s version. But she has a son called Caradoc (also danced by Paris Fitzpatrick), a dark, handsome figure, who stalks the stage.
Audiences go to Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty for the overall spectacle, the theatrical flair, the show business, rather than the choreography, and they will not be disappointed.
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