© roh/tl 'Invitation To The Ballet' exhibition details Royal Ballet 'Step by Step' Lowry Gala to open the Exhibition ROH Collections Ian Palmer reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

So it begins in County Wicklow, the birthplace of de Valois (then, humbly named Edris Stannus), where photographs show her home and family. Her father, a Colonel in the Army, died (throughout her life, de Valois kept a photograph of his grave by her bed-side, also on display here) and upon his death the family moved to London, where de Valois' love of dancing, which she had developed through performing Irish country jigs back home, was nurtured. Photographs and publicity material show her in the "Lila Field Wonder Children", a dance troupe which she joined, aged thirteen, and in which she danced an impression of Anna Pavlova in Fokine's Dying Swan (noting later that there was probably not one English seaside theatre at which she had not performed). Postcards from admirers chart her success and one, from a soldier on leave, tells how the memory of her dancing sustained him even on the battlefield.

She attended classes given by Enrico Cecchitti and an early photo-shoot from a 1917 Dancing Times shows her in the studios of Edouard Espinosa, holding various academic poses for the camera. But it was perhaps in 1923, when de Valois joined Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes" that her education really took off. Posters, souvenir programmes, photographic stills preserve her work in that troupe and its astounding repertoire, not least creations in ballets by Bronislava Nijinska, of which we particularly remember Les Biches. From Diaghilev, de Valois learnt the strength of will required to run a company and saw the need for England to have its own national troupe, arising properly from the firm foundations of a national school.

So the exhibition tells of this genesis and of those early years of the school and company at its base in Islington. It salutes those early giants, Lilian Baylis, Constant Lambert, Alicia Markova, whose costume for the second act of Giselle is displayed. It tracks the early choreographies by her, by Frederick Ashton, by Robert Helpmann, with which she cemented the company's reputation. Her notebooks reveal in startling detail the absolute minutiae of her thinking behind the 1931 ballet Job and images of her in rehearsal, of Anton Dolin as Satan and of the work's apotheosis show Gwen-Raverat's superb Blake-inspired designs. One marvels at the quality of the artists whom de Valois engaged and whose works are presented: John Piper, Sophie Fedorovitch, Edward Burra, Osbert Lancaster. Edward Mcknight Kauffer's costumes from her ballet Checkmate are on show – that for the Black Queen as worn by Beryl Grey and that for the Red Knight, together with his headdress - and we see the beautiful scarlet frock-coat as worn by the titular hero of The Rake's Progress as well as Rex Whistler's designs and stage-model for that ballet.

One photo preserves her wicked humour as the maid Webster in Ashton's Wedding Bouquet with its designs by Lord Berners; and Ophelia's gown from Hamlet and the Burra sketches for Miracle on the Gorbals rightly remind us of Helpmann's important choreographic contribution to the company, not least in his continued employment (as an Australian he was exempt from military conscription) during World War II when the other male dancers and choreographers were sent off to fight.

The war years are charted in a huge wall display that maps the company's ENSA tours, both before and after the occupation of France and a private letter – blown up to maximum size on the wall – recounts in personal, yet awfully "stiff upper lip" manner, the terrifying ordeal of their flight from Holland in the initial days of its Nazi occupation. Remarkably not one performance was cancelled during the war, not even during the Blitz, and the company sustained itself by touring the country and performing in myriad non-theatrical spaces (a fact of which the present Covent Garden company should take note).

It was during one of these tours to Manchester that it is believed L. S. Lowry first saw the company and became "a fan" and a portion of his ballet memorabilia – programmes, cast sheets, his membership card to the local Ballet Club – are shown here. Even more intriguingly, the exhibition suggests that his especial love of the ballet Coppelia – in de Valois' production of course and a stage model of Lancaster's set sits nearby – and particularly the figure of the Coppelia doll itself, inspired some of his most erotic drawings, displayed for the very first time in public. These show tightly corseted doll-like women, their breasts tantalizingly peeking out, with great bows at their back, that might easily be the automaton's wind-up keys. Presented with a video of Leanne Benjamin in the ballet's second act, the argument makes fascinating sense.

The end of the war saw the company's move from Islington to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the need to up-scale its productions in size. A vividly colourful photograph (if I am not mistaken, it is the first colour photograph in the exhibition and all the more striking because of that) shows Helpmann awaking Margot Fonteyn in the Oliver Messel designed Sleeping Beauty, which marked the beginning of the company's post-war identity. Fonteyn's huge importance to its growing international fame, and her position as the company's Prima Ballerina Assoluta, is marked in images of her in rehearsals with Ashton for Symphonic Variations and Ondine (her costume is also exhibited) and most strikingly in the re-creation of her Covent Garden dressing room complete with tutus, make-up, fan letters, spare pointe shoes and all the other appurtenances of a ballerina's private area.

Thereafter the exhibition moves swiftly and with clarity through the company's later years, honouring de Valois' retirement gala in 1963 and the succeeding directorships of Ashton, Kenneth Macmillan, Norman Morrice, Anthony Dowell, Ross Stretton and Monica Mason. Posters and photographs from the Royal Opera House archives, many of which have never been displayed before, catalogue the splendid variety of the Royal Ballet's repertoire as it has continued to expand over the years with masterworks created specifically for it. Two rooms bulge with costumes from the Royal Ballet stores (I am informed that there are sixty-four in total on display throughout the exhibition), from Natalia Goncharova's Firebird tutu, and La Capricciosa's gown (as worn by Svetlana Beriosova) from The Lady and the Fool, to those designed most recently for Wayne McGregor works.

Threading through the exhibition is a four-part video documentary, approximately an hour in length, that is directed by Lynn Wake and takes much of its script from de Valois' biography Come Dance With Me, narrated by Jeanette Lawrence. Fascinating interviews with Dame Beryl Grey, (who admits to always having been terrified of "Madam"), Sir Peter Wright, Dame Monica Mason and David Bintley punctuate it and, (though I find an attempt to liken her stern determination to build a school and company to that of the Black Queen in Checkmate, somewhat clunky in conception) it should be made available in DVD format for public viewing.

I have certain niggles: that the later years of the company's history are slightly hurried over and that neither Ashton, nor especially Macmillan (nor indeed poor John Cranko), really get the thorough treatment that the earlier figures of the tale do. Similarly, the character of Nicholas Sergeyev, so central in helping to establish the company's core classical repertory (albeit not a man much liked by de Valois) is notable by his absence. Nevertheless, it is a fine exhibition, perhaps the finest the Lowry has, in its ten years of existence, put on and it is of immense credit to the Royal Opera House and its archivists that in the first weekend alone over 1300 visitors came to see it, making it certainly the most successful the Lowry has staged. For anyone who loves ballet, who loves the Royal Ballet, who is fascinated by the flowering of talent and ideas which was masterminded by that incredible woman Ninette de Valois nearly eighty years ago, this is a must-see exhibition.