Birmingham Royal Ballet: La Fille Mal Gardée review

You forget how many props are involved in a production of this ballet. The performers are variously called on to dance inventively with ribbons, a cleft staff, butter churn, flute, maypole, spinning wheel, tambourine, sticks and hay bales. There’s an actual pony to negotiate (the remarkably well-behaved Oscar). And that’s before you consider the poor souls dancing in chicken costumes, or the comedy clog-dance routine. And yet choreographer Frederick Ashton fashioned this daunting amount of bucolic paraphernalia into a joyous ballet – a chirpy romcom that celebrates an English pastoral idyll, with a nod to pantomime tradition, despite technically being set in rural France. 

Birmingham Royal Ballet’s latest revival does justice to the work’s lightly mischievous sense of fun. With Carlos Acosta in charge of the company, you’d expect nothing less – as a Royal Ballet principal, he was superlative in the role of Colas, the impecunious young farmer trying to woo Lise against the wishes of her mother. 

Here, the Mexican soloist Enrique Bejarano Vidal takes on that role with a puppyish bounce and enthusiasm, which sometimes propels him a little too fast through Ashton’s intricate steps, not leaving quite enough in the tank to achieve the necessary polish. But he looks suitably besotted with his Lise, a doll-like Beatrice Parma whose strong acting instincts and animated facial expressions add crackle to her sharp performance – she’s dutiful to her bossy mother, but spiritedly determined to get what she wants. 

Continues…