Matthew Bourne's 'Sleeping Beauty' on PBS Great Performances

I watched Matthew Bourne's 'Sleeping Beauty' which I had recorded from PBS Great Performances over several evenings last week.  It completes Bourne's reconceptions of the great trilogy of Tschaikovsky ballets -- 'The Nutcracker', 'Swan Lake', and 'Sleeping Beauty'.  The so-called 'male' 'Swan Lake' became an enormous hit in London, on Broadway and around the globe.  We saw 'The Nutcracker' in Los Angeles over ten years ago.  It's set in a Dickensian orphanage. 

In rethinking 'The Sleeping Beauty', Bourne has tackled the thorny problem of the love story.  How realistic is it for Princess Aurora to awaken from a 100-year sleep by the kiss of a prince she has never met, then to immediately fall in love with him and marry him?  

Bourne's solution is that the fairies from the Prologue are also vampires -- vampire fairies.  

The six Vampire-Fairies in the Prologue/Christening.  Liam Mower as Count Lilac is third from the left.
Photo by Simon Annand

This clever and trendy (think the 'Twilight' series of novels and films and the HBO series 'True Blood') combination allows him to make the Act I 'Rose Adagio' into a love duet for Aurora and her true love, the gamekeeper.  

Hannah Vassallo as Aurora and Dominic North as Leo, the gamekeeper, after she is pricked by the thorn
Photo from BBC

When Aurora is pricked by the rose thorn and falls into that century of slumber, the Lilac-Vampire-Fairy bites the gamekeeper -- making him an immortal gamekeeper-vampire-fairy.

Meanwhile, Carabosse, the evil fairy is only a fairy -- not a vampire --  and thus sickens and dies after making her curse in the Prologue.  She's replaced by one of her sons, Caradoc,  who is distraught at his mother's mistreatment by the royals in the Prologue.  He proceeds to enact the curse on Aurora at her 21st birthday celebration.  Later, Caradoc deceives Leo, the gamekeeper-vampire-fairy, into bestowing the awakening kiss on Aurora.  Then Caradoc abducts her for a blood wedding to himself.  

Hannah Vassallo as Aurora arrives for the 'blood wedding' to Caradoc
Photo by Simon Annand

Caradoc is foiled by the Lilac-Vampire-Fairy who kills him with the sacrificial dagger he is about to use on Aurora.

Count Lilac (the Lilac Fairy-Vampire) stabs Caradoc with the ritual knife to end the blood wedding
Photo by Simon Annand

Aurora is spared to wed the gamekeeper and the Apotheosis shows them happily married with their own vampire-fairy-child.

Wedding of Aurora (Hannah Vassallo) and Leo, the gamekeeper-vampire-fairy (Dominic North)Photo by Simon Annand

Throughout the ballet Bourne's choreography ranges from inspired to insipid.  Bourne often demonstrates that he has studied the Petipa original and uses it as the reference point for his own choreographic deconstructions.  His variations for the six fairy-vampires in the Prologue is one clever example.  He uses Petipa's dance motifs for each of the fairies, but then lets his choreographic imagination take hold to expand and alter them to suit his fairy-vampires -- half of whom are female and half male.

In Act I, Bourne's choreography to the garland dance often undermined the waltz impulse of the celebratory music in order to make points about the Edwardian setting.  While his choreography to the Rose adagio music moved the love story forward, it really rode over many of the natural climaxes that are so beautifully effective in the traditional Petipa choreography.  

The vision scene was really more of a collection of dance moments than a sustained exploration of longing and desire. 

Bourne discarded much of the Act III music for the wedding guests (bluebirds, precious jewels, red riding hood) and used the Puss'n'boots music for a dance for the corps with cat-claw motifs.  Bourne used Tschaikovsky's music for the wedding pas de deux for the action sequences of the interrupted blood wedding.

The Prologue/Christening is set in 1890, the year that Petipa's production opened at the Maryinsky in Saint Petersburg.  Act I is set in 1911 on Aurora's 21st birthday celebrated with an Edwardian tea dance/lawn tennis party in front of the castle.  The Act II vision scene is set in a birch forest where most of the characters are in Edwardian corsets and undergarments.  Act III begins in 2011, the year before Bourne's production was introduced.  It starts with the awakening in the birch forest and then moves to a blood-red underground club where all of the characters are dressed in red and black for the blood wedding.  It ends in 2012 with the birth of the vampire-fairy-child to Aurora and Leo.

Aurora as a baby and Leo and Aurora's vampire-fairy-child are played by puppets manipulated by puppeteers using sticks.  They add a whimsical note to the Christening and the Apotheosis.

Having seen all three of Bourne's Tschaikovsky reinventions I think they all display some novelty in their conception, but fail to follow through with consistent levels of choreographic invention.  'Sleeping Beauty' falls back on the admittedly clever vampire-fairy concept but dance imagination often flags.