English National Ballet’s Cinderella review: Puppetry, projection and raw human emotion

Cinderella in-the-round is truly at home in the Royal Albert Hall

Erina Takahashi as Cinderella and Francesco Gabriele Frola as Prince Guillaume in Christopher Wheeldon’s ‘Cinderella in-the-round’ (ASH)

English National Ballet’s Cinderella swoops and swirls through the Royal Albert Hall, truly at home in the huge space. Christopher Wheeldon’s production transforms it into a forest or a ballroom, puppetry and projections blooming across the arena – but always finds room for human emotions.

English National Ballet is now an old hand at arena ballet: from its first Swan Lake in the round in 1997, the company has become a regular summer visitor. Productions are on a lavish scale, with more dancers – over a hundred for this Cinderella – but they also need to convert steps designed to be seen from the front into something that works from all angles. This time, the production feels truly tailored to the space, making magic of it.

Wheeldon’s tweaks to the storyline come with some gorgeous visuals. Instead of a fairy godmother, his heroine is protected by the spirit of her dead mother, shown as a tree. In Daniel Brodie’s projections, a green sapling springs up from the grave.