MOPSY PEEL reviews the Royal Ballet’s production of Like Water for Chocolate at the Royal Opera House.
There is something faintly comic, deliciously so, about watching the Sunday-best British contingent file into the Royal Opera House, pearls glinting, brogues buffed, programmes folded, only to spend the next two hours witnessing two people devour each other on stage. Christopher Wheeldon’s sumptuous adaptation of Laura Esquivel’s eponymous novel, Like Water for Chocolate [Como agua para chocolate], is not a ballet concerned with restraint. It is an eruption of passion, magic, grief and desire, wrapped in tulle and sweat.
From its opening moments, the production announces itself as a work of enchantment. Magic realism drapes the stage like a veil, transforming kitchens into cosmic battlegrounds and bodies into conduits of longing. Esquivel’s world finds a startlingly faithful companion in Wheeldon’s choreography, where emotions refuse the confines of the flesh and instead blaze into food and fantastical fire.
Joby Talbot’s score began with a jaggedness that set my teeth on edge; sharp, staccato insistences that made me think this is going to be a piercingly long evening. But somewhere between the second and third act the sound unfurled, softened, swelled. By the time the orchestra joined forces with our opera soloist for the evening (Sian Davis) during the penultimate pas de deux, the effect was near-transcendent. This seamless weaving of voice and movement was a lament and a longing, rising together like steam from a boiling pot. This is mirrored in the levitation of our two leads above the stage, arms and legs entwined, suspending both themselves and the audience in rapture.
To accompany the jilting lilts, was the ocular atrocity of the un-pointed toe. In ballet, this is something so foreign, so disarming. Here, it is a deliberate unravelling of discipline: a refusal of the body’s most codified promise in this style of dance. Where the pointed toe signifies obedience to an inherited aesthetic, think of the crystalline exactitude of Swan Lake, the un-pointed foot drags both the dancer and the audience back to confront life’s roughness. In Like Water for Chocolate, the un-pointed foot anchors the choreography to the earth and to the kitchen rather than the clouds.
On this night we had Mayara Magri in Tita’s role and there was something luminous about her stage presence, an otherworldly clarity to her movement that makes the supernatural feel plausible. Opposite her was Leo Dixon as Pedro. In Magri and Dixon’s hands, desire becomes a language, fluent and entirely consuming. The ensemble swirls through Wheeldon’s world with equal conviction, none more striking than in the Day of the Dead sequences, where skeletal dancers drift across the stage in candlelit hues, the boundary between life and afterlife beautifully and deliberately blurred.
What makes the production especially beguiling is how unashamedly sensual it is. Ballet often flirts with intimacy; here, it plunges into it. Bodies entwine with a kind of ritualistic intensity while the British audience sits politely, hands folded, expressions fixed in that uniquely national mortification, the stage burns with a heat entirely unconcerned with decorum. Perhaps that contrast struck me most sharply when I returned to the Opera House the following week for La Fille Mal Gardée. There, everything was prim, pastoral, and delightfully proper, the comedic capers of chickens and sweethearts serving as a neat palate cleanser after the molten chaos of Like Water for Chocolate. It was as though I had travelled from a world where emotions boiled over like pots left unattended, to one where everything was whisked into tidy peaks of charm.
In a theatre that so often traffics in fantasy, this production dares to show passion in its rawest, most ungovernable form. It is a reminder that emotion, like fire, refuses to stay within the lines we draw for it. And perhaps that is the true magic of the ballet: not the spectacle itself, but the way it leaves you walking back into the crisp London night feeling as though something inside you has been quietly set alight.
Like Water for Chocolate ran from 1-24 October 2025 at the Royal Opera House, Bow St, London WC2E 9DD.
Featured image courtesy of the Royal Ballet and Foteini Christofilopoulou.