Matthew Bourne's SLEEPING BEAUTY sees the eclectic choreographer return to the music of Tchaikovsky to complete the trio of the composer's ballet masterworks that started in 1992 with Nutcracker! and, most famously, in 1995, with his international hit Swan Lake, featuring an all-male corps de ballet.

Charles Perrault's timeless fairy tale about a young girl cursed to sleep for a hundred years was turned into a legendary ballet by Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa in 1890.

Bourne takes this date as his starting point, setting the event of Aurora's christening at the height of the fin-de-siecle period, when fairies, vampires and decadent opulence fed the Gothic imagination.

Awakening from her century-long slumber, Aurora finds herself in the modern day, a world more mysterious and wonderful than any fairy tale.