Reviews

Review: The Red Shoes (Sadler's Wells)

Matthew Bourne takes on Powell and Pressburger’s famous 1948 film about love, art and obsession

If anyone wants a lesson on how to tell a story with pure dance, they should ring up Matthew Bourne. The man is a master of narrative, a wizard at staging the apparently unstageable.

Take the first few moments of his brand new version of Powell and Pressburger’s famous 1948 film about beautiful young Vicky Page, the talented ballerina forced to choose between her passion for dance and her love for the young composer Julian. On stage, within the real proscenium arch, there’s a smaller golden one, with red curtains that part as Victoria (Ashley Shaw) steps forward and dangles the enchanted Red Shoes in the spotlight.

Then the curtains pull back to reveal a lovely parody of a 1940s ballet, with romantic, swirling couples, big jumps and bigger sighs. The frame turns and we see the dancers backstage – and glimpse Vicky watching in the auditorium that is now at the rear of the real stage. With confidence, she steps from the imaginary audience, onto the stage, which is transformed into a party which the impresario Boris Lermontov (Sam Archer) is reluctantly hosting in aid of his ballet company. Vicky dances, full of raw grace, hands flicking the air, trying to attract his attention, to get into the company she has just been watching; but it is the pianist Julian (Dominic North) who is noticed.

The next day, both are backstage taking a class – introduced by a wonderful witty duet for the prima ballerina and her tutu (still on a hanger) walking in and out of the following spot. And the story is underway. Barely ten minutes have passed and Bourne, with the help of the fluent, fabulous sets of his long-time collaborator designer Lez Brotherston, has created entire worlds.

This particular world is one that has always enchanted Bourne and he makes it entrancing here, paying tribute to the old ballet companies and the old movies that inspired him in his youth. The score is by Bernard Herrmann, orchestrated by Terry Davies and although the lush, evocative music mainly predates his associations with Hitchcock, it is a neat touch to make the actual ballet of Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes, redolent of the early films of the Master of Suspense.

Here Vicky, wearing the cursed red shoes that won’t let her stop moving, is blown through a sumptuous stylised landscape of black, white and greys, trees and buildings scudding by. It’s very affecting, as she judders and jumps desperately trying to pull the shoes from her feet, but it also has the dance equivalent of perfect pitch, exactly catching a sense of period.

Throughout, Bourne’s choreography is supremely expressive. When Lermontov explains the ballet to Vicky, he pushes her gently by the wrists, flicking her into motion; when she falls in love with Julian they walk by the sea, their movements mimicking the flow of the waves, her body draping around him; when disillusion sets in, he tries to tear the red shoes off her feet – they have become even in private a symbol of her possession by art.

Her final headlong rush to tragedy – where onstage and off have become too intertwined to tell them apart – is also dramatically imagined, and features a wonderfully realised train crash.

If anything, the second half is perhaps too rushed: we see the lovers happy, but we don’t experience enough of the professional jealousy and misgiving that makes Lermontov try to tear them apart. And try as he might, without words neither Bourne nor the excellent Archer, lurking suavely in the shadows, can quite capture the obsession with the purity of art that drives his vision.

But the story is beautifully told, and full of vivid incident. As the story whisks from Monte Carlo, to the south of France, to the rougher edges of the East End, each scene moves the narrative along with imaginative fertility and sharp contrasts. When the company cavort with beach balls you see the life of creative luxury they lead; when Vicky is forced to dance in a music hall, the bottom-twitching of the strongmen is both truly funny and a revelation of the dancing depths to which she is condemned.

Every performance, from the least significant to the leads, is committed and finely drawn. As Vicky, Shaw has just the right mixture of innocence and driving devotion, North is fiercely compelling as Julian – the scene where he dances his passion for music is one of the best of the night- and Michela Meazza and Liam Mower as the leading members of the Lermontov company illuminate the stage every time they step on it.

It has become a tradition for Bourne to bring a show to Sadler’s Wells to enliven Christmas; this sumptuous offering is one of his most deeply felt and very best.

Click here to buy tickets for the tour

Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes runs at Sadler's Wells until 29 January 2017 and then tours.