The Dream

Sir Frederick Ashton's The Dream is the jewel of his classical legacy — a one-act ballet of shimmering enchantment drawn from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, condensed with masterly efficiency into forty-five minutes of pure theatrical delight. Created for The Royal Ballet in 1964 to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, with Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell making their partnership debut as Titania and Oberon, The Dream distils the play's central plot — the quarrel between the fairy king and queen, Puck's mischievous interventions with the love potion, the enchantment and disenchantment of the Athenian lovers — into a work of perfect classical proportion.

Ashton uses John Lanchbery's arrangement of Mendelssohn's incidental music for the play, and the choreography flows with the music's wit and lyricism in typically Ashtonian fashion — the steps seeming to grow naturally from the score as though no other movement were possible. The pas de deux for Titania and the enchanted Bottom (transformed into a donkey), in which the fairy queen lavishes adoration on the oblivious weaver, is a masterpiece of comic choreography. The central pas de deux for Titania and Oberon in the final act, reconciled after their quarrel, is conversely one of the most tenderly beautiful in the Ashton canon.

Puck, danced by the prodigiously gifted Keith Martin in the original cast, is one of the great character roles in English ballet — a creature of pure quicksilver energy and gleeful mischief. The Dream requires the full range of classical technique from its cast, but the genius of the work is its lightness: it sparkles rather than dazzles, enchants rather than overwhelms, leaving audiences with an afterglow of pure happiness.