It was a night that everyone loves to remember, even if they weren’t there. February 20, 1946, the night that The Sleeping Beauty reopened the Royal Opera House. Everyone who was anyone was in the audience: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, the Prime Minister Clement Attlee, a host of other VIPs and celebrities. On stage were Margot Fonteyn and the rest of Sadler’ s Wells Ballet, newly catapulted into the limelight as Britain’s national dance company.

The Opera House seats had to be dusted off for the occasion (they had spent the Second World War in storage, while the venue was converted into a dance hall), dinner jackets had to be rescued from mothballs. Backstage they were still rushing to finish the costumes even as the first notes of Tchaikovsky’s music sounded in the auditorium. But when the curtain rose on Oliver Messel’s lavishly designed Sleeping Beauty, the splendour of this fairytale enterprise cheered the postwar spirit like nothing else.

You could say that this was the night the Royal Ballet (as Sadler’s Wells Ballet was later christened) came of age. From then on, the company would be resident at the Royal Opera House; from that day forth The Sleeping Beauty would be its signature work.

If I had a time machine, February 20, 1946, would certainly be on my radar. So when the Royal Ballet announced that, as part of its 75th birthday celebrations, it was going to revisit the iconic Messel Beauty, my heart was thrilled. Now, at last, we would see what all the fuss was about.

Monica Mason, the current director of the Royal Ballet, is well aware of what it meant to a country shattered by war and hardship. “The Sleeping Beauty had a huge impact,” she explains. “It was the end of the war and after six years of rationing and suffering, of the stoicism of a whole nation, the greyness and drabness of those days, it was the glow that lit up Covent Garden.”

On May 15 Covent Garden will see the curtain rise on the new “old Beauty”, staged by Mason and Christopher Newton and based on the 1946 production by Ninette de Valois and Nicholas Sergeyev, which itself was based on Petipa’s St Petersburg original. The Messel designs are being revived, alongside some new designs from Peter Farmer.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this great Russian ballet in the Royal’s history. A glittering showcase for classicism, it brought the company credibility at home and earned it huge acclaim abroad. “The Opera House had been asleep for six years during the war and we came in with our Beauty; we kissed it and brought it back to life,” Mason says. “Three years later, when we took it to America, we were a young company bursting with energy and the desire to conquer the world. This is the ballet to take us back to our roots.”

Yet recent productions at Covent Garden have failed to honour the ballet’s unique status. Anthony Dowell’s 1994 staging (which had its premiere in Washington in front of President Clinton) may have had a wonderful choreographic text (the most beautiful I have seen), but its dominating, dizzying designs, by the late Maria Bjornson, threw the ballet into disarray.

In 2003 Natalia Makarova’s banal Russian-inspired production (with its ghastly little Cupid introducing every scene) was an even bigger — and far costlier — mistake and was jettisoned, despite its £800,000 price tag. It had been commissioned by Ross Stretton during his brief tenure as Royal Ballet director, but he wasn’t around long enough to oversee its unfortunate premiere.

“When I took over the company, we were so far down the road with Makarova that it would have been wasteful to pull back,” Mason explains. “It was only when all of us had seen what she had done that we realised she had given us a production that didn’t feel as if it was ours. It came with a different set of values, both musically and dramatically, and it absolutely wasn’t the Royal Ballet, which is why I thought we should return to what is ours.”

Mason draws the line at a Kirov-style reconstruction, although she admires that company’s four-hour-plus reproduction of Petipa’s 1890 Beauty. “Everybody had talked endlessly about the strengths of the Messel staging, but I didn’t want a museum-type realisation of the past,” she says. “His style of costuming was not to have a harmonious palette; instead, he designed very strong individual costumes. Today’s designers don’t see it like that and I didn’t want the costumes to look quaint.”

The man entrusted with fighting the “quaint” factor is Peter Farmer, one of the most experienced dance designers in the world and a man with 11 Sleeping Beautys on his CV. His job, as he puts it, is not to design another Beauty but “to support” Messel’s original vision. He’s leaving the sets for the Prologue, Act I and Act III as they were. “Oliver’s architectural sets are excellent, and audiences will appreciate them all over again,” Farmer says. “They are as fresh as anything and they’re so confident that any feeling of being dated disappears. He also got the scale of the fairytale right. It’s not just a palace, it’s the best palace; Aurora is not just a pretty girl, she’s the most beautiful girl: Oliver understood that.”

But Farmer has completely redesigned Act II, which contains some of the ballet’s key dramatic moments, such as the ethereal Vision Scene and the Prince’s journey in search of the sleeping Aurora. “Oliver didn’t make much of the journey, it was very simplistic,” Farmer adds. “So Chris Newton and I have worked out a much more exciting journey, a big panorama to match the music, but still with a hint and a nod to Messel.”