Like bingeing on cheap chocolate: Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s work. I’ve mulled over this in print elsewhere several times, and I feel conscious that if Bourne reads reviews – perhaps he doesn’t – he might be groaning into his Corn Flakes. But his reputation is so securely high (a knighthood, Tonys and Oliviers galore), his popularity so ubiquitous, that an honest doubter can’t do him any harm.

Here are the pros. He has invented a recipe of his own, hard to imitate, though many have tried – a mix of Kenneth MacMillan’s sexed-up ballet idiom, Cameron Mackintosh-Andrew Lloyd Webber theatrical spectacle, and the cinematic fantasies of Disney and Tim Burton. He has a keen sense of what makes good theatre – in other words, he can spin a yarn, create vivid characters and hold a restive audience’s attention. In Lez Brotherston he has a wonderful in-house designer, who unfailingly provides him with richly atmospheric stage pictures.