ballet, Apparitions, to music by Liszt, featuring Helpmann and the teenaged Margot Fonteyn. Sorley Walker writes that he and Fonteyn were a "perfectly matched partnership", exemplified by "their superb rendering of the Aurora pas de deux in The Sleeping Beauty". As well as romantic leading roles, Helpmann became known for his gift for comedy. Sorley Walker singles out his roles in Coppélia, Ashton's A Wedding Bouquet and de Valois's The Prospect Before Us. Character roles included the doddery Red King in de Valois' Checkmate, which he first danced at the age of 28 and last danced in 1986 when he was 77. Helpmann's non-ballet work in the later 1930s included his Oberon in Tyrone Guthrie's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic, which also starred Vivien Leigh as Titania and Ralph Richardson as Bottom. The drama critic of The Times wrote: It will be useless in future for Mr. Robert Helpmann to pretend that he is exclusively a dancer of the first rank. Certainly his dancing gives strength to his Oberon; he glides into imagined invisibility; but that is not all: his verse sings with his thought, his Oberon flashes with power, and presides, as Oberons do rarely, over the whole magic of the wood. The doyen of London critics, James Agate, pronounced Helpmann's Oberon to be, in its way, "the best I have ever seen or ever shall see". While at the Old Vic Helpmann met the director Michael Benthall; they formed a lifelong personal partnership and frequently worked together in the theatre. 1940s During the Second World War Sadler's Wells Ballet became a prominent contributor to public morale, giving London seasons interspersed with a demanding programme of provincial tours. Helpmann's workload often required him to dance leads in three performances in one day, and when Ashton was called up for active service in 1941, Helpmann took on the additional role of choreographer to the company. Ashton, in his enforced absence from the company, observed Helpmann's rise to pre-eminence with feelings of envy, and their relationship became edgy on Ashton's part. The ballets that Helpmann created for the wartime company were Comus (1942, based on Milton), The Birds (1942, to Respighi's Gli uccelli), Miracle in the Gorbals (1944, a story of redemption with a plot by Benthall and music by Arthur Bliss), and a version of Hamlet set to Tchaikovsky's music. While on leave from the