Coming to Leeds in perfect timing for the season of rebirth, Rapunzel is staged in The Courtyard Theatre where Leo Owen caught the show

Lesley Sharp (Scott & Bailey; The Full Monty) narrates in a lyrical opening voice-over written by the former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. In balletLORENT’s reimagining of Rapunzel, the titular character’s parents take centre stage and act as a framing device, opening the show desperate for a child only to lose her to their wicked magical neighbour and spend the rest of the story fantasising her future.

Choreographer and Artistic Director, Liv Lorent, begins Rapunzel’s story with a playful flirtatious dance to illustrate her parent’s love. Utilised with versatility to make a tower, garden walls and house, decorative rotating iron trellis panels act as climbing frames too for Lorent’s exceedingly nimble dancers.

Including a community cast at each tour venue comprised of babies and toddlers aged one to three (in Leeds from Richmond Hill Academy School) with their professional dancer mothers, Lorent’s Rapunzel ingeniously celebrates fertility. A mother of two herself, she has very consciously cast performers returning to work and even one who is clearly pregnant, ensuring her choreography meets the needs of those still experiencing pregnancy and its after-effects.

Lorent makes use of a wide variety of props to add to the overriding playful tone of Rapunzel, including scooters, skateboards, balloons, a sledge, kites, toddlers’ walkers, balls, rhythm wands, an old-fashioned pram and even a hover board. The result is fun to watch with exceedingly acrobatic and smiley performances. Lorent’s choreography to depict the prince's yearning for Rapunzel is strangely beautiful and a real stand-out routine. The toddlers twirled across the stage, however, are amazingly well-behaved so deserve a mention too.

Rapunzel’s parents’ apparent struggle to conceive at the start of the story is very much central to the tragedy of their loss. Something Lorent, repeatedly emphasises throughout, including an especially poignant but joyous maypole dance. Costumes by renowned Game of Thrones designer, Michele Clapton, are earthy in tone, celebrating fertility too. Clapton’s most impressive design is undoubtedly the witch’s reptilian pets who are ridden, whipped and caressed.

Award-winning Doctor Who composer, Murray Gold, complements all this with his epic instrumental soundtrack realised by the musicians of Northern Sinfonia. Gold’s composition fittingly has an ethereal fairy-tale quality and he reprises Rapunzel's breathy wordless vocals hauntingly across scenes.

Much like the company, the audience is multigenerational and leaves smiling. A real triumph for balletLORENT.

Rapunzel showed in The Courtyard Theatre from 5-6 April before continuing its UK tour: https://www.balletlorent.com/news/balletlorents-rapunzel-goes-tour