Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes

As I mentioned in my first post, The Red Shoes was a firm favourite of my grandma, who rushed to see it when it first came out in the cinema in 1948 when she was seventeen. This is the production that I desperately wanted her to see, but her illness was diagnosed around the time of its premiere and so it wasn't to be. Grandma physically would have made a convincing Vicky Page, perhaps a tad darker in hair colour, more of a deep red than ginger and so aside from her love for the film, there will always be a connection for me in terms of her physical attributes.

This production had apparently been 20 years in the making for Bourne  and it was well worth the wait. The story telling was superb - of course some adaptations to make this work as a pure dance production, but overall, this made the performance slick and fast paced. There was perhaps a bit of a loss of the message that Paige was torn between her love for Julian Craster, the composer/conductor and her love of ballet, symbolised through Lermontov and his company.  This would be quite a difficult story to tell in dance alone, but perhaps lost with the very first change to the plot - Svetlana bows out due to an injury, whereas in the movie, she leaves to get married, Lermontov being the force who demands marriage to the ballet. Creative license and editing of stories is always needed to pull together the production and to those familiar and unfamiliar with the film, the story still retained a very clear thread.

According to an interview in the programme, Bourne gave all of his dancers - not just his Vicky Pages - a name based on the historical talent of the day to study in order to draw it into their performance. Ashley Shaw was Vicky Page at Sadlers Wells for the performance I saw and in the first act at some points - costumes included - it was almost like seeing the ghost of Moira Shearer!

The staging was supreme. Central to the stage was a rotating curtain/stage frame, allowing us to see what happens from the audience's perspective in performance and also behind the scenes - and this switched around in seconds.

The 'Red Shoes' sequence was cleverly done in black and white, aside from the Red Shoes and Vicky Page's dress which also had elements of red. There was a duality between this and when Vicky Page returned to the ballet company towards the end of the performance, leading to her altercation with an oncoming train. I do wonder how much sense this bit would have made to those who hadn't seen the movie and therefore didn't understand the degree of the struggle between two loves.

That aside, this is a production which I hope continues to live on in Bourne's repertoire beyond his 30th anniversary year on which it is on tour. I might pop up to Manchester and take a family member when they return in July or even head to one of the other locations to see it again. I hope it might even make a TV screening, or a DVD/Bluray for posterity.

For photos, head to DanceTabs Flikr album here.

For more information on where to see The Red Shoes on tour, visit the production site here.