Dance
Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
five stars
IF YOU have seen the 1948 Powell and Pressburger film, then you’ll know that the young ballerina at the heart of it meets a tragic end. Matthew Bourne has now made a vivid and compelling dance version of The Red Shoes and, because he takes you headlong into Vicky’s drive to succeed, you long for him to change that ending. Please can Vicky decide that the real love of her life is composer Julian Craster (dashingly danced by Chris Trenfield), whom she meets when she joins the Ballet Lermontov, or at least love him as much as the centre-stage spotlight that proves she is a dancing star.
Bourne and his creative team have kept the narrative in the late 1940’s, but The Red Shoes is a bitter-sweet tale for our times, where TV talent shows feed briskly on hopeful ambitions. You soon understand that this Vicky (an outstanding Ashley Shaw) has steely determination behind her wide-eyed charm. While others relax during rehearsals – Bourne’s back-stage scenes are richly detailed, wickedly witty mini-dramas in themselves – Vicky goes on practising. Her obsession with perfection is a vulnerability that the despotic impressario, Lermontov (Sam Archer, in darkly implacable mode) cashes in on when he dangles a pair of scarlet pointe-shoes – and the leading role in a new ballet – under her nose.
Throughout Bourne’s choreography there have been cunning vignettes-cum-pastiches that echo the innovative repertoire of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. For The Red Shoes – framed by Lez Brotherston’s cleverly brutalist minimal set – his response to the Bernard Hermann soundtrack totally captures the edgy, modernist energies of a relentless dance with the devil. Brotherston’s designs, Hermann’s film scores, Bourne’s choreography and superbly versatile dancers: all are so brilliant, you could wish those red shoes to keep dancing on and on.
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