Choreographed by Christopher Hampson CBE

Music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Review by Eloise Robertson

Festival Theatre

A crystalline, emotionally generous production: visually ravishing, theatrically assured, carried by a cast and creative team who know how to make Andersen’s frostbite glow with warmth, Scottish Ballet’s The Snow Queen returns to Edinburgh.

At the centre of the evening are performances that give the tale its human stakes. Kayla‑Maree Tarantolo’s Gerda is all earnestness and steel; she carries the quest with a dancer’s clarity of line and an actor’s emotional honesty. Jessica Fyfe’s Snow Queen is statuesque and chilling in equal measure, a presence who can freeze a room with a single, measured gesture. Bruno Micchiardi’s Kai is the still point around which the drama turns, and Melissa Polson’s Lexi (the Summer Princess) brings a sunlit counterpoint to the ice, her movement language suggesting warmth even when the choreography demands restraint. The company’s ensemble—circus performers, townspeople and wolves—populate the stage with a joyous theatricality that keeps the narrative moving and the younger audience utterly engaged.

Christopher Hampson’s choreography finds the story’s pulse and refuses to let spectacle drown its heart. The production’s visual language—Lez Brotherston’s designs carved in pale planes and jewel‑bright accents, Paul Pyant’s incisive lighting and Richard Honner’s musical arrangement of Rimsky‑Korsakov—creates distinct worlds: the bustling market, the circus camp, the dark wood and the Snow Queen’s glittering palace. The Festival Theatre stage becomes a series of tableaux, each one precise and purposeful, so that when the transparent curtain lifts to reveal the frozen palace the effect is not merely pretty but narratively telling.

Musically and atmospherically, the production is rich. The Scottish Ballet Orchestra, under guest conducting, and the onstage presence of violinist Gillian Risi in the second act add a live, visceral layer to the storytelling; the score’s use of Rimsky‑Korsakov’s textures, reworked by Honner, gives the ballet a folkloric sweep that alternately soothes and unsettles. The circus sequences crackle with life—acrobats, clowns and a ringmaster (Benjamin Thomas) bring a carnival energy that contrasts beautifully with the palace’s crystalline austerity. Hampson’s choreography is at its best when it lets character inform movement: Gerda’s determination is expressed in compact, urgent phrases; the Snow Queen’s dominion in long, glacial lines.

What lifts this staging above a merely pretty retelling is its dramaturgical intelligence. The production trusts the audience to follow shifts in tone and geography without heavy-handed signposting; instead it uses costume, light and a few deft props to move us from market to wood to palace. The storytelling is economical but never mean: there is room for wonder—puppetry and small theatrical flourishes that feel like discoveries rather than tricks—and for the darker edges of Andersen’s tale. Children will be dazzled by the circus and the wolves; adults will appreciate the elegiac moments where the choreography allows grief and longing to breathe.

If there is a quibble, it is that the narrative’s many set pieces sometimes demand rapid tonal changes that can feel slightly abrupt; a gentler thread between some episodes might have deepened the emotional through‑line. Yet these are small ripples in an otherwise steady performance.

A winter spectacle with a beating heart: Scottish Ballet’s The Snow Queen boasts impeccable design, committed leads, and a company that revels in theatricality. It is a family‑friendly feast that also rewards those who come seeking the subtler pleasures of dance theatre—precision, atmosphere and a story told with both frost and fire.

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