Magical Feast for The Senses with Sleeping Beauty

Scottish Ballet's 'Sleeping Beauty' at Eden Court offers stunning visuals as well as fine dancing.

Sleeping Beauty

Scottish Ballet

Empire Theatre

Eden Court

****

IT would, of course, be missing the point, but it is entirely possible to enjoy a Scottish Ballet production without actually being that interested in ballet.

Costume or design more of an interest? Then you have also come to the right place.

With the main stage of Eden Court variously transformed into a pre-Victorian Russian palace, an Enchanted Forest populated by fairy tale characters and lastly a sumptuous London nightclub of the 1940s, the sort of place where you might bump into Paul Temple enjoying a cocktail, there is already plenty of eye-candy to enjoy, even before you start considering the costumes.

These ranged from the organic looking garb of the elfin princes, all leaves and veins, to the sweeping Victorian dresses of the palace ladies and the Ruritanian uniforms of the men to the witty elegance of the ballet’s post-war wedding party where Claire Robertson’s Cinderella is easily identified by a hat which, on closer inspection, actually turns out to be a shoe.

If the production is a feast for the eyes, the ears are not short-changed either, conductor Timothy Henty and his orchestra deservedly getting as rapturous applause as any of the dancers for their splendid live playing of Tchaikovsky’s lush score.

Not that anyone could overlook the dancing.

The ballet’s format, with its baptism, birthday and wedding parties, seemed to give every member of the cast a chance to take centre stage. Of a uniformly high quality with plenty of big jumps and graceful pirouettes to impress a packed Eden Court, the stand-outs were Sophie Martin as an enchanting Princess Aurora and the elegant Eve Mutso as a fairy princess.

However, every good fairy tale needs a worthwhile baddy and here too "Sleeping Beauty" scored highly in Carabosse (Sophie Laplane) and her hideous daughters Pina and Lucinda (Bethany Kingsley-Garner and Laura Kinross) — one half-bat, the other half-pig.

Casually tossing baby Aurora over their shoulders or kicking their way over the banquet table to disrupt the banquet feast, the diabolical trio were an exercise in carefully choreographed mayhem, with an unusual method of getting Princess Aurora to prick her finger and fulfil Carabosse’s prophecy.

Out-going artistic director Ashley Page has revived his version of "Sleeping Beauty" a number of times since it premiered in 2007, but there is a reason for that. Elegant, graceful and witty with its high-production values, it is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser — maybe even for ballet sceptics.

•Scottish Ballet’s "Sleeping Beauty" is at the Empire Theatre, Eden Court, until Saturday 28th January.

CM