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

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.

Then, through Basil Twist’s puppetry, it grows into a majestic, three-dimensional tree, with spreading silk canopy. A crowd of woodland creatures flood on stage to take Cinderella to the ball: green men, conker-headed courtiers in hairy tweeds, sharp-beaked bird creatures. (Delightfully, some of them later join the queue to try on the slipper.) Puppeteers conjure a coach around the heroine: horse heads in front, wheels underneath, and off she flies, with her cloak billowing out like a sail.

But the special effects don’t upstage the dancing. Wheeldon deploys a huge band of courtiers for the ballroom: framing the action, creating curling floor patterns, then springing together with clockwork menace as midnight strikes. Gavin Sutherland conducts a stirring account of Prokofiev’s spiky score, with rich sound from the English National Ballet Philharmonic.

Erina Takahashi is a quick, fluent Cinderella, suggesting a core of resilient steel under her early sorrows. She flows through the big arcs of movement, commanding the space. There’s a warm connection between Takahashi and her Prince, Francesco Gabriele Frola, who shows a soaring jump in his solos.

Supporting roles are nicely detailed. Ken Saruhashi, as the Prince’s friend, falls for Katja Khaniukova’s bespectacled stepsister, straightening her glasses after a mishap and kicking off a sweet, shy romance. Fernanda Oliveira swaggers as the other sister, while Sarah Kundi is a glamorous stepmother, with wittily timed hiccups in her tipsy ballroom solo.

The English National Ballet’s Cinderella runs until 25 June