A wintery delight: Scottish Ballet’s The Snow Queen

Theatre Royal, Glasgow
January 15, 2026

Scottish Ballet’s The Snow Queen may feature the eponymous icy monarch of the title, sweethearts Kai and Gerda, and a broken mirror and shards of glass that find their way into the latter’s eyes, but in many other respects the story is quite a way from the Hans Christian Andersen original with many new characters. It’s all the better for it.

In Hampson’s telling, the Snow Queen lives in a distant ice palace with her sister, the Summer Princess. They fall out when the Princess sees a vision of herself embracing a young man in a magical mirror, before setting off to find him, now disguised as a man, Lexi. The queen shatters the mirror in rage, providing the later all-important shards of glass.

Living life as a pickpocket and armed with one of those shards, Lexi finds Kai in a small town. But he’s in love with Gerda. When Lexi refuses the Snow Queen’s request to return home, she blows crystals of glass into Kai’s eyes, causing him to see what is beautiful as ugly. The Queen then steals Kai away to her icy world, setting in motion Gerda’s quest to find him, with the help of Lexi as an unlikely ally.

There’s a lot more, not least a travelling circus filled with very believable characters but while Hampson rattles through the story with pace, you never feel like you are being rushed. It’s a fine ballet dramaturgically, the story always flowing easily and clearly. Nothing feels forced.

The really memorable moments all come in the busy ensemble scenes. It feels like every character has been given a backstory. And yet things are never so busy that you ever miss any of the important drama between Gerda, Kai, Lexi and the Snow Queen.

It gets off to a fine start, the audience meeting The Snow Queen and her Summer Princess sister through a ‘window’ in a gauze, which rather cleverly has the effect of making it feel like one is watching events far away. It does hide feet, though.

The marketplace in Gerda and Kai’s village, when we are introduced to the young lovers, is a hive of colour and action. A pas de deux for the couple, danced here by Gina Scott and Evan Loudon, is gently and sweetly romantic. Rather touching and very appealing, it’s packed with playful little pushes and pulls, and loving glances. Scott danced beautifully throughout, looking desolate after Kai magically disappears, and showing plenty of anger and inner fire in her set-tos with Lexi.

Lexi, the excellent Grace Horler, is almost ever-present. Not a single movement is wasted. Everything has intent. While she often skips around the stage with a near devil-may-care attitude, every now and again the cloak slips a little suggesting the bravado is hiding something rather deeper.

The village scene later bursts into technicolour life when the circus opens, contrasting deliciously with the Snow Queen’s icy white realm. With his long hair, striped trousers and vivid red coat, Thomas Edwards, was full of showmanship as the larger-than-life Zach, the Ringmaster, as he conducted proceedings.

I also loved Benjamin Thomas’ Strong Man and his ballerina partner, Kayla-Maree Tarantolo, apparently quite happy to be tossed around or held aloft a barbell. The pair of clowns, Charley Austin and Hamish Longley, similarly demanded attention, their comedy full of laugh-out-loud slapstick, all timed perfectly.

Lez Brotherston’s sets are as wonderful throughout as one has come to expect from the top designer. But he really outdoes himself with the circus travellers’ camp in the second act. Two traditional caravans in a forest clearing, a fire blazing as the moon peeks through the bare-branched trees, it really is a picture, one rather reminiscent of that in Frederick Ashton’s The Two Pigeons. It’s also a scene filled with fine dancing, especially in a men’s dance led by Edwards that’s powerful and athletic. Everyone threw themselves into it, the dance burning up the stage marvellously. Fortune teller Mazelda, Rishan Benjamin, was another strikingly powerful performer.

Moments later, Brotherston gives us a snowy forest, a magical place full of dancing Snowflakes and Jackfrosts in choreography that puts classicism very much to the fore.

Brotherston’s costumes are as perfect as his sets. Elsewhere, Paul Pyant’s lighting and Richard Honner’s musical arrangement of selections from various Nikolai Rimsky-Korskov compositions help create the ballets many worlds. The ‘Flight of the Bumblebee,’ heard when Kai gets the shards of glass in his eyes, does come as a surprise, though.

As the Snow Queen, Roseanna Leney was imperious and certainly danced well, but there’s not a great sense of evil. She certainly didn’t make me shiver. Top marks for her Snow Wolves, though. Harvey Evans and Mackenzie Jacob snarled, frightened and pressured just like Carabosse’s attendants. Only in white.

You have to feel for whoever dances Kai. There really is little to develop in the way of character once those fragments of glass get in his eyes. Under a spell, he’s little more than a puppet. A shame. Loudon is clearly a fine dancer. His pas de deux with The Snow Queen, for example, was wonderfully executed in terms of movement and steps, but it did lack soul. It was a cool as the Queen’s icy crown.

The ending is a tad problematic. Lexi transforms back into the Summer Princess and walks arm-in-arm back into The Snow Queen’s icy palace with no regrets and all apparently forgiven. I just don’t buy it. More convincing is the happy reuniting of Gerda and Kai. I wonder how they got home again?

The Snow Queen is a ballet I’ve never really got on with. Perhaps it’s something to do with choreographers wanting to stick close to Hans Christian Andersen’s original narrative. But Christopher Hampson’s version for Scottish Ballet is like a breath of fresh air. A terrifically entertaining spectacle, it’s a wintery delight.