This ball is quite an event

MATTHEW BOURNE’S CINDERELLA, Lowry, Salford

YOU might have thought it was only film stars who had their name above the title — but I suspect in this case it’s as much a warning to parents not necessarily to take their children along, despite the “Cinderella” bit.

Bourne’s Cinderella isn’t the kind of thing you will see from any other dance company. This Cinders is set in London in 1941, with the downtrodden girl the daughter of a shell-shocked Army officer and a hateful stepmother and step-siblings.

Bourne drags the dark heart out of Prokofiev’s 1945 terrific ballet score for Cinderella (highly reminiscent of his magnificent “Romeo and Juliet” score), and spins a musical without words that has glamour and danger, wartime sounds, old Pathe newsreel and a gorgeous black-and-white theme, the dance itself Bourne’s usual, attractive hybrid of modern ballet and classical style performed by energetic and attractive dancers.

And the amazing sets and lighting wouldn’t look out of place in a mega-musical: Lez Brotherson has redone his original designs and they are simply magnificent: a detailed, expansive London vista; a Tube station, the war-torn cafe set and an amazing, bomb-hit East End are among the highlights.

The ballet actually stems from the creative bloom of Bourne’s all-male “Swan Lake” back in the late Nineties, revised this year as his 50th birthday present to himself and to mark the 70th anniversary of the London Blitz.

Cinders escapes into dreams about movies and glamour — and one of them comes true, when she runs from the house and is knocked out by a blast. She dreams, in act two, of a dance hall packed with glamorous women and Armed Services personnel in which she meets a handsome pilot, and which is then destroyed by a bomb. The incident is based on the historically-factual direct hit on the Cafe de Paris, in which 100 people died. Or does she? Bourne keeps things ambiguous, sometimes suggesting she is dreaming it all, at others supplying a fairy godfather and sparkly slippers so she can lose one and have her beau find her again — after they have both ended up in hospital.

As has been the case with several of Bourne’s recent works, this is less about dance and more about the overall event — and it’s quite an event.