Are you sitting comfortably? We’ll soon fix that. Matthew Bourne’s 2012 Sleeping Beauty is back at Sadler’s Wells for a seven-week residency. Though sumptuously staged and strongly danced, Bourne’s lavish, subversive makeover of Marius Petipa’s 1890 ballet is let down by pedestrian choreography and a vampire-themed storyline that is already showing its age.

Lez Brotherston, who has designed every Bourne production since 1994, excels himself here. The palace’s black and gold columns and cornices have a gloomy grandeur and the gauzes and backdrops enhance the depth of the Wells’s stage and create multiple centres of interest. Concealed travelators enable the dancers to glide in and out of view — every Beauty director should get one. The more gothic moments are bathed in Paule Constable’s bloodstained sidelights. The costumes are ravishing, mixing the “anyone for tennis?” Edwardiana of Aurora’s birthday party with the shredded, Arthur Rackham-ish threads of Count Lilac and his doomy gang of fairies. Unfortunately, their black tights make leg- and footwork all but invisible against the sooty set.

Bourne cherry-picks from the familiar fairytale, adding larky flourishes of his own. The childless Royals acquire a baby (Tchaikovsky’s thrilling overture repurposed as birth pangs while bad fairy Carabosse conjures the infant into being), and little Aurora (a clever three-man puppet) is entertained by a quintet of fairy variations. Elmhurst-trained Enrique Ngbokota and James Lovell make light work of Fairy Tantrum and Fairy Autumnus (ballet’s loss was Bourne’s gain).

There are regular glimpses of other ballets — Anastasia act one, Giselle’s mad scene — and Bourne borrows freely from Petipa’s Beauty, quoting hands and fingers in the fairy variations and the linked-arm ensembles for Count Lilac’s cortège. But the exultant Rose Adagio, in which the balancing ballerina greets each of her four suitors, is reduced to a game of kiss-chase.

Tchaikovsky’s score, taped and amplified, has been freely adapted and is supplemented (some might say sabotaged) with baby cries, thunderclaps and other extraneous noises in Paul Groothuis’s sound design. Many familiar passages are taken at a thrilling, almost Mariinsky-like pace to help ginger up Bourne’s often uninspired routines in which the chorus step, twirl, grind and twerk their way through waltz or polonaise.

The new scenario is action-packed but strangely lacking in motivation. Bourne had always been unconvinced by Aurora’s convenient coup de foudre at her awakening, and decided to introduce a love interest that predates her 100-year sleep. His barefoot princess (the feather-light Ashley Shaw) shuns courtly protocol, preferring to skip about, adorably showing everyone her bloomers. She is smitten by the palace gardener (Andrew Monaghan) who submits to a kindly bite from Dominic North’s watchful Count Lilac so that he will still be undead (and available) when the sleeping princess awakens.

The fatal spindle (here a black rose) is supplied by his rival Caradoc, son of Carabosse, danced with satanic glamour by Paris Fitzpatrick. Unfortunately the characterisation is perfunctory and the love triangle of loss and reconciliation at the heart of Bourne’s reworked story never quite takes flight.

★★★☆☆

To January 15, then touring, new-adventures.net