Matthew Bourne has already branded his imagination on two of the great Tchaikovsky ballets, reinventing a dark, Dickensian Nutcracker and a feral Swan Lake. But in tackling Sleeping Beauty, he has set himself a harder challenge. This is a story whose pallid principal characters and simple plotline would seem to resist any reinterpretation.
In the original 1890 ballet, choreographer Marius Petipa compensated for the lack of drama through the scale and detail of his dance invention. And there are moments in Bourne's version where his choreography doesn't have the bravura elaboration to match the grandeur of Tchaikovsky's music. But from the minute we hear thunderclaps and a baby's howls bursting through the (taped and edited) version of the score and see the looming winged silhouette of the wicked Carabosse, it's clear that Bourne and his designer, Lez Brotherston, have found wonderfully deviant new ways of telling their material.
Key to their version is the fact that Aurora is no pinkly perfect princess but a rebellious child of nature. Even as a baby she is wild; portrayed by a diminutive but captivatingly realistic puppet, she runs amok in the palace and grins delightedly at the fairies who bring her gifts. If she's the star of the first scene, the fairies themselves are also fine. Despite the gorgeous shimmer of their costumes they come with a dangerous edge: the Lilac Fairy is a man (an eerie, autocratic performance from Christopher Marney), while the others have names such as Tantrum and Ardor. Bourne's choreography makes some adroit references to the original Petipa steps, but reworks them with a range of flickering, sensual, comic imagery that's anything but fey.
By act two, Aurora is a restless tomboy who has fallen in love with the palace gamekeeper, Leo. But Bourne's clever plot twist is that Carabosse, as well as laying a curse on the young princess, has left behind a sexy, glamorous son called Caradoc, who is competing with Leo for Aurora's heart.
At a stroke there's a dramatic new element of tension in the plot that keeps it alive all the way through the dreamy pastoral fantasy of act three – a silvered, mirrored forest peopled with sleepwalkers – to Caradoc's hellfire party in act four, where he appears triumphantly on the verge of claiming, and killing, Aurora. Adding in a vampire dimension (the Lilac Fairy turns out to have teeth), this Beauty romps through to its denouement with gleeful style.
Purists may wince at some of the musical edits that Bourne has imposed, yet they are dramatically strategic, and oddly sometimes allow us to hear new things in Tchaikovsky's score. They certainly contribute to the charisma and colour that Bourne manages to give to his fairytale characters, including the sweetly affecting lovers: Dominic North as the puppyish but heroic Leo, and Hannah Vassallo as Aurora.
Beauty can never rise to the tragic turbulence of Swan Lake, but in Bourne's clever gothic rewrite, he has triumphantly discovered something beguiling and true.
