Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling blocks – all of which the Royal Ballet’s new production throws into relief. Ashton isn’t altogether to blame: Prokofiev’s graphic score dictates an excessive amount of time given over to knockabout for the Ugly Sisters (mostly a matter of them bumping into each other) and a tiresome court jester. There’s nothing to be done with an inert third act, which in Ashton’s treatment merely recapitulates previous choreography and ends with a static tableau. The Prince has no personality whatsoever: he’s little more than a handsome porter.
Yet genius shines through. Created in 1948, in the wake of the flawless Symphonic Variations and Scènes de Ballet, Cinderella offers rich pickings: a title role that a succession of great ballerinas – Shearer, Fonteyn, Beriosova, Sibley – has inhabited with winsome charm; a series of exquisitely subtle variations representing the four seasons; and some superb neoclassical sequences for the corps, reflective of a fascination with Euclidean geometry.
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