Tales of Beatrix Potter

Largely unimaginative interpretation of a number of Beatrix Potter's stories, which accumulates a lot of top-line dancers and totally obscures them from view under piles of rigid costumes (Michael Coleman's Jeremy Fisher is a rare exception). There was, perhaps, a virtue in the ballet being set in a natural (as opposed to theatrical) landscape, and the muted photography evokes the original Potter drawings. Inserts show Potter as a young girl drawing animals in the nursery of a forbidding Victorian household, taking her solitary joy in the Lakeland countryside. Otherwise, perhaps the chief interest lies in choreographer Frederick Ashton's performance as Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, and in the fact that the film was co-written and designed by one Christine Edzard, who went on to direct Little Dorrit, The Fool, etc.