First published in The Tab, 26 February 2010.

It must be dreadful to be a ballet mum. Imagine it: watching from behind a rictus grin as your portly offspring flounders about on stage like an autistic hippo, sighing, “You looked so beautiful, darling,” through painfully gritted teeth while praying that little Lizzie will lose interest before the next big show.

Because, let’s be frank, amateur ballet is horrendous. It’s not like playing the piano, which can be executed perfectly well, albeit at a more modest level, by novices. No: if you’re a ballerina, you’re a ballerina, and you’re judged accordingly. And ballet critics, even more than classical music critics, can be savage.

Which is why it was so awful to see the valiant efforts of the Cambridge University Ballet Club sabotaged by appallingly shoddy production values, the like of which I haven’t seen since Sunset Beach. The most important component of any ballet performance, beside the dancers, is the music. Tchaikovsky was so hilariously and haphazardly vomited from the speakers that it twice prompted loud chortles from the row behind me. There were abrupt endings, weird volume changes and I swear we heard the CD skip during the penultimate piece of the first half.

But we can’t place all the blame with the production team for the audible sigh of relief after the final curtain. The director too seems to have sleepwalked through rehearsals: neither the more accomplished ballerinas nor the novices came off well after ill-judged and brutal juxtapositions of fluent performances with mass waddling and teetering from the less confident dancers. Which brings me to my other complaint: why were so many of these women so large?

At one point, I don’t think there was a ballerina on stage below size 18. Now don’t get me wrong, I know we’re growing as a nation, and sure, big can be beautiful, but honestly, I never expected to see a ballerina with bingo wings. (I should point out that it’s not just the ladies of the Ballet Club who ought to lay off the pies: one of the male ballerinas looked like he’d been preparing for months for The Sleeping Beauty… by eating deep-fried Mars bars.)

In the interests of fairness, I must tell you the improbably tall lilac fairy went down a storm with the audience, and there was a delightful little set-piece in the first half that involved pink umbrellas and a cute girl I recognise from the English faculty. The staging was pretty good, too: simple, but effective, even if transitions were generally over-long.

In fact I wish that we’d seen a bit more from the umbrella girl, and perhaps that camp couple dressed in black, who were very good. And, as I’ve said already, I wish the Ballet Club would put a bit more thought into how their less talented, but no less enthusiastic, dancers are presented.

More than anything, though, I do so wish Sleeping Beauty had shaved her armpits.