Created by Sally Cookson, Adam Peck, and the Original Company

Directed by Jemima Levick

Review by Dominic Corr

The Lyceum

Cinderella is the fairytale that refuses to fade: morality and wonderment stitched alongside rags-to-riches promise, and a heart tuned to the season. Done right, it carries an engrossing sense of humour and a growling hint of Grimm beneath the glitter. Done wrong, it collapses into daftness or dour revisionism: something too many rewrites have been guilty of recently.

The urge to reinvent, to subvert, to file off the story’s older edges can tip a production into exactly what it hoped to avoid—drab, dull, desperate. Where The Lyceum’s Cinderella: A Fairytale triumphs is in looking the tale straight in the eye and embracing its roots, encouraging the enchantment and changing just enough to sign its own name. It’s one of the most successful festive productions the Lyceum has fielded in years: classic, magical, and mischief-minded.

Directing with a confident hush, Jemima Levick trusts that craft casts stronger spells than excess. Chiefly in Olivia Hemmati’s Ella: the show’s steady flame. No saint, no martyr—she listens, she notices, and she refuses to be reduced. Hemmati’s voice, spoken and sung, is measured and bright without sanding down its grain, and her Ella’s transformation is recognisable rather than cosmetic: a reclaiming, not a masquerade. Opposite her, Sam Stopford’s Prince is endearingly off-centre, awkward in the right ways. Together, they sidestep the gale of instant infatuation for a breeze of curiosity and kindness. Their chemistry grows in the forest—a shared language of trees and birds and twilight—and so the promise at the ball feels earned, not engineered.

And it’s difficult not be lost in this straight from the pages story, Francis O’Connor’s design draws the eye to crisp Autumn timber frames and shadowed corners, then blooms into colour when necessary, indigo night slipping into silver frost, then the ball blazing gold and carmine. Much is achieved with Emma Jones’s lighting which writes moonlight and hearth-glow with precision, while Parasol Wu’s sound and Jon Beales’s music nestle into the joints, guiding breath and pace without demanding applause. Emily Jane Boyle’s choreography keeps feet nimble and story clear, turning the ball into a jazz-flecked whirl of silhouettes and sparkle.

A star in its own right, Matthew Forbes’s puppetry supplies the production’s quiet, indispensable magic: a tilt of the head, a tremor of feather, the suggestion that the natural world is paying attention. Power in the palace arrives with a wink. Carly Anderson’s Queen wears authority lightly, turning protocol into play. There’s joy in how she opens doors rather than barricades them, and it lends the court a generosity rare in seasonal fare. Around them, the ensemble moves with clean agility, shifting gears to menace or merriment on cue. Richard Conlon makes a gentle, aching Father, present and absent at once, and then folds into the company’s precision with unshowy ease, a useful hand in the machinery as the story demands.

And then there is the glorious chorus of boos—remarkable only because it greets Nicole Cooper, award-winning performer, more often met with reverence than raspberries. Perched at the staircase, glaring down at young Ella’s sincerity, Cooper’s Stepmother distils the show’s needed balance of Grimm charm and modern snap. When the cleaver drops and the villainy reveals itself, Cooper turns to the audience with a smirking snarl, delighted to become the sport we rally against alongside Matthew Forbes and Christina Gordon’s ‘ugly’ stepsiblings, playful, mean-spirited, but with enough of a palette to be more than cutout roles. Copper plays the folly, the flint, and relishes the production’s technical illusions and playful imagery with total command. Across Scotland this festive season, you’ll struggle to find a baddie better pitched—magnetic, razor-edged, and never allowed to devour the show.

Much of this impact is engineered by O’Connor’s stagecraft, which leans toward a Roald Dahl tang—bright colour sugared over the everyday, danger murmuring from familiar objects. Ladders angle like crooked trees, brooms knit into canopies, and Ella’s fireside doldrums open, suddenly, into a world of wonder with the arrival of feathered friends. The birds are sometimes carried by the entire cast, hands and threads and breaths coordinated to suggest a living chorus. It’s not decoration; it’s dramaturgy, revealing how attention and care call magic into being.

The production understands the stakes of the tale: grief, labour, small kindnesses that become lifelines, the reciprocity between a young woman and the world that sees her. It respects spectacle but never drowns its truth in glitter. The magic here is time’s own: paths retraced, birds remembering, a slipper that fits because its wearer has finally stepped into herself. There is humour (sometimes daft, often sharp), and a sly grin at how tradition can be refreshed without becoming a lecture. Audience interaction is measured, never gimmicked; children lean forward, adults soften, and the auditorium warms by degrees.

An enduring testament to what fairytales represent, this Cinderella captures the Lyceum at its best: classic, magical, with a smirk of mischief. Whatever you’re seeking—romance, spectacle, craft, a story that holds both bruise and brightness—this show fits all sizes (and ages).

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