English National Ballet’s Cinderella-in-the-round

Royal Albert Hall, London
June 15 & 16, 2023

In one reading, Cinderella is a straightforwardly optimistic tale about what love makes possible: the breaking down of social divisions, the uplifting capacity of love’s whimsy flights of fancy. At its most morally heady, it reminds us that, sometimes, patience does resolve in justice, that fate can be kind to those who are good.

Yet there is also an incredible pragmatism to Cinderella’s treatment of love. After all what is at stake for Cinderella is a lot more than love. In many versions the prince is merely a cipher. Yet this does not necessarily diminish the dramatic stakes. He could be anyone because what really matters is what he represents: a shot at a life beyond domestic drudgery. If Cinderella takes her one chance to dazzle him, it is because she must. And if she dazzles him into loving her, it is also for what he could offer. Cinderella can be about both the Utopian possibilities of love and the pugnacity of those who seek, endure and struggle to create those possibilities.

Love of the pure, optimistic kind does matter in Christopher Wheeldon’s production. There is, in fact, not just one love story, but two. Stepsister Clementine (played by the hugely likable Katja Khaniukova on the June 15 opening night and Jung ah Choi the following afternoon), Cinderella’s kinder, gangly stepsister, finds love in the form of the prince’s friend, Benjamin (ably danced and acted by Ken Saruhasi on June 15 and Noam Durand on June 16).

As for the Prince himself, Wheeldon goes out of his way to create a backstory for him. In the opening moments of the ballet, the two protagonists’ childhoods are poignantly juxtaposed. Cinderella is seen mourning her mother’s death. A scene which gives way to the hallways of the palace where the prince and Benjamin offer us a very different vision of childhood, one unmarked by loss.

The two protagonists then meet in Cinderella’s kitchen where the Prince, having been instructed to find a wife, is disguised himself as a beggar. Instead of dismissing this stranger Cinderella offers him kindness and the two blushingly stumble over dance steps. This scene, which gives the central love story narrative weight, is one of Wheeldon’s better interventions.

Other plot innovations are slightly more perplexing. Instead of a fairy godmother (or other magical creature) capable of advancing the story‘s magical plotline, Wheeldon employs a quartet of men who embody the forces of ‘Fate.’ They are implacable, even martial, moral guardians of luck who physically manoeuvre objects and bodies around the stage. At the final denouement, it is these four men who place Cinderella onto the kitchen table to face the Prince, enabling their final, fateful meeting.

The outsized role Fate plays does pose some conundrums. For one, while the ballet still relies heavily on magical effects to advance the narrative, there now isn’t quite a magical cause to attribute these effects to. At moments, I found myself rather confused. How did she make it to the ball? Where did the ball gown appear from? Fate is an interesting explanatory cause but what precisely its logistics or mechanics? Does it produce actual material objects?

Wheeldon’s explanation seems to be that nature works alongside fate to conjure up miracles for Cinderella. That land, nature or dead ancestors (Cinderella’s dead mother is a motif that figures heavily in the ballet) might possess healing or spiritual properties is a refrain in many cultures and would, in a different cosmological universe, make sense as a surrogate ‘fairy godmother.’ But in the European world of Wheeldon’s Cinderella it is not quite clear how she might possess the knowledge or power capable of eliciting nature’s magical properties.

But pesky queries about the logistics of magic aside, what of the dancing? The opening night cast was led by two veteran Leading Principals, Erina Takhashi and Francesco Gabriele Frola. They offered a technically accomplished performance, navigating each hurdle with unfussy ease. But they were almost too unfussy. I missed a sense of dramatic immediacy; in particular, a sense of wonder that goes beyond skilled professionalism. 

It was only at the next day’s matinee. which saw the debut of Precious Adams as Cinderella, that I felt something of love’s rapt breathlessness. Adams, a dancer who has long radiated potential, seemed both utterly unfazed by the role’s pressures but also charmingly and enthralling, awestruck to find herself matching its demands.

Both she and her Prince, Daniel McCormick, danced with abandon, luxuriating in Wheeldon’s expansive movement vocabulary. They were sweetly awkward in their first encounter in Cinderella’s kitchen, sensual and mysterious in the ballroom, swooningly tender in the final pas de deux.

This was important for another reason too. Wheeldon’s version has the prince disguise himself as a beggar, a disguise in which he first encounters and befriends the downtrodden Cinderella. On opening night, I found myself wondering whether this invention was an improvement. I felt especially unsettled by the gendered implication that it might be her ‘suffering’ that he is first attracted to.

Most likely, I thought, he found her interesting not because of who she is but because of how her precarious circumstances made her different from the other privileged women in his life. I felt this especially because Takahashi and Frola’s attraction never seemed to deepen beyond that initial encounter. She stayed wide-eyed, demure, chastely virtuous.

The next afternoon, these questions were resolved through the dancing itself, however. By showing us the evolution of their relationship, Adams and McCormick offered a much more complex, multifaceted account of attraction. And in doing so, justified Wheeldon’s narrative intervention. By the end, in the irresistible glow of their final pas de deux, I could almost believe that a ‘happily ever after’ if not for Cinderella, then for their careers, were well within reach.

English National Ballet perform Cinderella-in-the-round at the Royal Albert Hall to June 25.