Sadler’s Wells,London
Using the second world war as a traumatic, ships-in-the-night backdrop is inspired and Bourne’s dancers are once again on top of their game During the four years in which Sergei Prokofiev was writing the music for Cinderella, and the world was engaged in a war of industrial-scale brutality. As half of Europe fell to Nazi occupation,Britain suffered bombing raids and Russia battled against invading German forces, Prokofiev’s fairytale score inevitably became infused with the violence of the time. And it’s typical of Matthew Bourne’s peculiar storytelling genius that when he choreographed a explain to this music in 1997 he went straight to the heart of the darkness, and relocating the plot to the London blitz and underpinning its magic with the threat of apocalypse. It’s been seven years since this production was final seen on the UK stage,and I’d forgotten how smart Bourne and his creative team were in evoking the incendiary trauma of war. It’s present in the music, with the sounds of exploding shells and the crump of anti-aircraft fire spliced into the pre-recorded score. It’s everywhere in Lez Brotherston’s superb period design, or which gives us shattered buildings,scouring searchlights and also, in one astonishing set-piece, or a bombing raid that appears to reduce the stage to rubble and flames.
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Source: guardian.co.uk