Cinderella, English National Ballet, touring

Was it with a hollow laugh that ENB programmed Cinderella for the election period - as a reminder that glittery fairy phaetons are in fact pumpkins with money? Was it a hint that ballet needs political fairy godmothers? With airwaves full of budget cuts, nothing was more welcome yesterday than to go into a Bristol Hippodrome matinee, full of noisy children, and watch this delightful fairytale of wish-fulfilment laid before them. Even better, with the radiant Elena Glurdjidze as the ash girl.

This version, made by Michael Corder for ENB in 1996 and now embarking on a UK tour, has the same lilting Prokofiev music as the immortal Royal Ballet production made by Frederick Ashton (which is about to open in Covent Garden, by another election-time coincidence), and the same original designer too, David Walker. Unsurprisingly, it has a very similar look to the last Covent Garden production, if with more stress on costumes than sets. It’s handsome and feels right, but could do with more magic - it lets itself down heavily on the Act 1 and 2 closers by making no attempt at a pumpkin, and no special effect when the clock strikes midnight. Cinderella just runs off. Call me curmudgeonly, but I think if you put on a children’s fairy tale, you should deliver the two big bits of magic in the story.

However, credit to Corder for avoiding cloning Ashton’s version. He gives Cinderella a lovely affinity with the moon from the start, her arms yearningly garlanding the crescent moon, and a delicate silvery aura (provided by lighting designer Paul Pyant) bathes her in a special ethereality. He also gets away with making his Ugly Sisters pretty girls, rather than men in drag, by fashioning them as thoroughly fiendish playground bullies, in the way that girls have a unique purchase on. Poor Cinders gets poked, pummelled, pushed and thoroughly intimidated, and once cowed she has to undergo Stepmother too, a harridan who has crushed her old dad into a dressing-gowned crock. Where in Ashton’s version Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters are funny, unreal, lovably grotesque, Corder’s have an apt modern echo of real unpleasantnesses at home.

This family drama gives the first act its emotional motor, but doesn’t substitute for the absence of real character magnetism in Cinderella’s solos, which feel repetitious. What Corder has is a genuine gift for arranging a splendid edifice of virtually plotless classical dancing in the second Act, the ball scene. There are not many choreographers who could so confidently and majestically marshal layers of ensembles, solos and pas de deux as he does for more than half an hour in this aesthetically engrossing act, whose classical architecture rises with purpose and elegance.

The nasty step-family provide some genuine entertainment by their pompous and selfish antics

After a fluid display of courtiers in navy blue, the nasty step-family provide some genuine entertainment by their pompous and selfish antics. Cinderella arrives in breathtaking style, held high with a white veil flying behind her as if she had just stepped off the moon. The grand pas de deux is proud, correct academic ballet, and offered beautiful scope for Glurdjidze’s gracious taste and warm tenderness. Arionel Vargas smiled too readily to retain a Prince’s ideal nobility (and there were too many stumbles there as well) but he knew not to crowd this ballerina, to give her space to dazzle, a valuable trait in a man.

The final act trails off rather, with the Prince dreaming he’s going to end up with the stepsisters - clumsily staged with a few wafting curtains and far from gripping theatrical focus - and he makes a downbeat entrance at Cinderella’s home to try the slipper on the ladies of the household. Too often Gavin Sutherland’s conducting seemed to be dragging the music’s pulse back, and whether this is at Corder’s request or Sutherland’s preference, it time and again deflated some of Prokofiev’s most transfigurative music. The final scene’s choreography - set to music that shimmers in an almost incredulous hush and offers the most tender, reticent, moon-beam caresses for the unlikely marriage of the prince and the ash girl - is neat and correct but not juicy with either symbolic or emotional flavours. A little bit of money spent on the final scenery could make a difference.

Bouquets to Sarah McIlroy and Adela Ramirez as the Stepsisters, the embodiment of hoity-toity, and to the very amusing Dancing Master Juan Rodriguez, who knows how to work the back of the circle with the smallest moue. The company's girls, while routine in the fairy solos, looked like a proper constellation of stars in the beautiful tutu waltzes - sometimes ENB is at its most stylish when it's demonstrating its corps de ballet.

• Cinderella is at the Bristol Hippodrome tonight, tomorrow matinee and evening (phone 0844 847 2341); then tours to Manchester 21-25 April, Southampton 29 April-2 May, and the London Coliseum 11-14 August.
• Check out what's on at English National Ballet
• Daria Klimentová's website