The Red Shoes

Festival Theatre, 14/4/26

New Adventures, director and choreographer Matthew Bourne

Once upon a time, in 1845 to be precise, Hans Christian Andersen wrote a grim fairytale about a young girl’s fatal vanity. Around a hundred years later, in 1948, the film partnership of Powell and Pressburger took the story and based a magnificent film on it.

Fifty years after this, Matthew Bourne saw the film (before he had ever seen a live ballet) and was transfixed. Twenty years later he revealed this evening’s double Olivier Award-winning production: a tribute to the 1948 film and a love letter to the world of ballet, where art is more important than life itself.

Victoria Page is a talented ballerina who lives to dance, and who is propelled to stardom during a season at Monte Carlo by the charismatic, Svengali-like ballet impresario Boris Lermontov. She shines in ‘’The Red Shoes’, a ballet based on Andersen’s tale. However she falls in love with the composer of the ballet’s music, Julian Craster, and gives everything up to follow him back to London and a life of third-rate obscurity in an East End music hall. Fatefully, Vicky is tempted to return to Monte Carlo and dance ‘The Red Shoes’ once again, with dire consequences.

The central story of Matthew Bourne’s ‘The Red Shoes’ is a ballet within a ballet based on a film which is itself based on a fairytale: a seventeen-minute black and white dream sequence telling Andersen’s original story in startling contemporary dance with a Picasso-esque set and costumes. The only colour is provided by Vicky’s red costume and the eponymous red shoes, which take on a cruel life of their own and turn their wearer into a helpless puppet.

Cordelia Braithwaite, who danced Vicky this evening, was one of the two dancers to create the role of Victoria Page in the original production ten years ago. She gave an incandescent performance as a dancer torn between her love of ballet and love of a man. Andy Monaghan danced Boris Lermontov, the ballet impresario who tempts Vicky with the prospect of becoming the greatest dancer the world has ever seen, conveyed the menace and single-mindedness of his character perfectly. Jarrod McWilliams danced Julian Craster, the struggling composer who wins Vicky’s love, but in the end loses her, with a youthful emotion and helplessness in the face of fate.

The choreography ranged from classical to contemporary, with light and amusing scenes at the French seaside serving to throw the dark, emotional main story into stark relief. All the supporting dancers inhabited their roles with the gusto, insouciance, and superlative technical skills we have come to expect from Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures.

Rather than the film’s Oscar-winning score by Brian Easdale, this production featured a new score based on film music by the Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann and orchestrated by Terry Davies, including themes from ‘The Ghost and Mrs Muir’ (1947) and ‘Vertigo’ (1958). With sumptuous sets and glorious costumes designed by Lez Brotherston and atmospheric lighting by Paule Constable, the production was stunning, and provided the perfect setting for this jewel of a story.

It seems ungrateful to carp at such a superb creation, but if I could have changed one thing about this production it would have been to introduce a live orchestra or band instead of recorded music. To my mind, live music adds immeasurably to the immediacy of the whole experience.

Read the original story, see the film, and then revel in this enchanting balletic tribute to The Red Shoes.

Photo credit: Capital Theatres