Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes ★★★★★

The Red Shoes is a ballet inspired by a film inspired by a fairy tale. Matthew Bourne describes it as a “personal love letter to a life spent in theatre and dance”. First performed in 2016, The Red Shoes was the culmination of a twenty-year ambition to transform Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s eponymous 1948 film for the stage.

The inspirational film was itself inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name. The fairy tale is a gruesome affair: an orphan, adopted by a wealthy woman, becomes proud and vain. When she inappropriately wears her beloved red shoes to church, an enigmatic man enchants them. The cursed shoes force the young girl to dance forever. Exhausted and desperate, she asks someone to chop off her feet. The shoes, replete with severed feet, continue to dance; the girl repents her vanity and finds redemption.

The film and ballet have no such … erm … happy ending. Perhaps fortunately, they also have no severed feet. In a sanitised reimagining, set within a touring ballet company, The Red Shoes is both a love story (between an aspiring dancer and a composer) and a tale of artistic obsession. It follows the ballet company from city to city, joining the company on stage, backstage and off duty. It watches the aspiring dancer achieve her dance ambitions, fall in love, leave the ballet company, then pine for, and return to, the stage. Musing upon life imitating art, it features a ballet (a more faithful rendering of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, thankfully still absent amputations) within the ballet.

For those unfamiliar with Matthew Bourne, the word ‘ballet’ often conjures images of tutus, tulle, satin, feathers and men in tights (not the Mel Brooks ones!). Abandon those preconceptions. As you’ll have gathered, The Red Shoes is dark. It is also gloriously technicoloured (for the most part) and littered with mood-lightening humour. This is a glorious ode to the film that inspired it and to Hollywood, to a bygone era, to the dance stars and fashions of yesteryear, and an homage to the sacrifices that artists make for their art.

We watch the ballet company perform different shows in different cities. Lez Brotherston’s set and costume design is mind-blowing. A dynamic curtain and lighting rig create a stage upon a stage for a ballet within a ballet. It allows us to be, within the same scene, either in the audience or backstage. The same rig will later allow us, away from the theatre, to be in two different homes, watching the dancer and composer in their simple flat and the ballet company’s impresario in his more ornate property.

A few times, we watch the troupe off duty, relaxing at a café, for example. Compared to the fierce ambition and resolve we see in the theatre, these are humanising scenes showing the dancers as young people, drinking, smoking, having fun and capable of falling in love. The most quirkily beautiful and humorous of these scenes takes place at the beach, where some of the male dancers show off their very large balls. (Oi, this is art – get your mind out of the gutter!)

As we watch the ballet company preparing to perform their The Red Shoes, we see a small model of the planned stage set upon a table. Moments later, our stage transformed to bring that miniature to life; we watch the ballet troupe’s performance of (the other) The Red Shoes, not on a stage within a stage, as a glimpse of what their audience sees, but exclusively for us as their only audience. The stark stage and the black and white costumes contrast with the vivid colour that has preceded this moment. The dancers contort their bodies, somehow, at once, staccato and fluid. The lighting (Paule Constable), which is exceptional throughout, here makes the dancers’ shadows ominous and mesmerising. It is breathtakingly beautiful yet grotesque; dark, foreboding, ominous; with hints of Tim Burton and a magical, film noir quality. The music of Bernard Herrmann adds to the cinematic experience. This is not a score written for The Red Shoes but a carefully curated selection of the works of one of Bourne’s favourite (late) Hollywood composers.

Those that did ballet classes as children may recall sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, alternately pointing and flexing their feet, “fairy feet, witches’ feet, fairy feet, witches’ feet”. Bourne’s ballets always feature witches’ feet aplenty, but they’ve never seemed more integral or contributed so much to the emotion of each scene, bringing humour to the bright, technicolour pieces whilst increasing the tension and horror of the dark ones.

This is Matthew Bourne doing what Matthew Bourne does so brilliantly, bringing an art form often perceived as niche and elite to the masses, and he is aided by a wonderful cast and crew. Undoubtedly, Cordelia Braithwaite, as aspiring dancer Victoria Page, wearer of the red shoes, carries much of the burden of the show and does so with aplomb. A professional dancer or, perhaps, frequent ballet attendee might be able to rank the dancers on technical merit and single certain performers out for the highest praise. To anyone else, they all seem improbably talented, moving in perfect concert with their partners and the troupe, or alone, as the moment requires.

For an audience used to being spoon-fed through film and television that vocalises every nuance of plot and emotion, ballet is a more challenging and personal experience. Unlike even the silent movies The Red Shoes invokes, it has no intertitles on which scene, dialogue or explanation can appear. Everything must be deduced from the visual clues. Like Shakespeare, ballet is in an unfamiliar language that requires effort. So, like an exam student heading off to see their first Shakespeare play, investing time ahead of the show to research the premise and the plot is rewarded.

The Red Shoes is not going to convert stalwart ballet haters, but it might be the perfect gateway for the undecided and uninitiated. It is jaw-droppingly beautiful and guaranteed, fleetingly, to revive every ex-ballet student’s childhood dreams.