The Red Shoes was the film that cemented my love for ballet. I saw it on TV one dreary Sunday afternoon, and there on screen were the people I’d been reading about in books: Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine, Robert Helpmann. Backstage at the imaginary Lermontov Ballet in the postwar period was exactly how I envisioned life as Ninette de Valois struggled to form the company that became the Royal Ballet.
Of course, because Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 movie is a masterpiece, it’s more than a history lesson. In telling the story of the dancer Victoria Page, caught between two men – composer Julian Craster whom she loves, and company director Boris Lermontov, who demands absolute devotion – to him it asked a huge question. What are you prepared to sacrifice for art? In the gleaming, fetishised red shoes that are its defining image, it suggests that dance itself demands a dedication you are prepared to die for. “Why do you want to dance?” Lermontov asks. “Why do you want to live?” Vicky replies.
I’m not sure then or now that dancers would describe their calling in quite such melodramatic terms, but there’s something nagging there still, in the siren call of art, its ability to bring colour into a monochrome world. All the things I love best about Matthew Bourne’s award-winning adaptation of the film into a two-act narrative dance work, first seen in 2016, precisely catch this enchantment. He’s brilliant at evoking the lure of the empty theatre, the magic hanging in the air when the audience have left and the performers are going about their tasks. There’s a scene early on where the company’s ageing prima ballerina (wonderful Michela Meazza) stalks the stage, making the follow spot track the sylphide’s dress she is holding, sticking out an arm or a leg to show the movements she will be performing, wafting its fairy wings.
It’s funny but also revealing; it shows just how much work goes into an apparently effortless act. It also demonstrates how deeply Bourne is in love with dance. Every step in this imaginative and affecting narrative is etched with his knowledge and passion. Each parody of different types of ballet is acutely crafted. The ballet within the ballet, which tells Hans Christian Andersen’s original story of the red shoes dancing a peasant girl to death, is a modernist triumph.
Lez Brotherston’s sumptuous designs help enormously. The device of a gilded proscenium arch that moves across the stage allows us to see both backstage and what the fictional dancers are performing, sometimes simultaneously. Scenes move fluently from the glamour of Monte Carlo to a run-down East End musical hall, complete with comedy camel dances and disenchanted burlesque girls. Terry Davies provides a fine score, made from the film compositions of Bernard Herrmann.
But it is Bourne who finds the steps to express the feelings powering the story. When Craster (Dominic North, a firecracker of energy and fizzing romance) is composing, he jumps around the grand piano as if possessed. As Vicky steps into the spotlight, she arches her back and stretches her arms in a sensuous embrace of possibility, which Ashley Shaw, who returns triumphantly to the part she created, embodies with fragile, wide-eyed longing. Her love duets with Craster are emboldened, full of athletic lifts and entwined embraces; as disillusion sets in, the red shoes on her feet seem to pull her away from his despairing grasp.
The role that feels underwritten is that of Lermontov. Adam Cooper, returning to the company where he first performed in 1995 as the erotic, dangerous Swan, brings all his considerable charisma and glamour to the role. He glowers thoughtfully from the shadows, watching Vicky’s progress; his hands twitch with frustration when he sees her fall in love and his face is full of something like hate when he banishes her from the company. But aside from one lovely duet, he doesn’t have quite enough to do, and Cooper’s brilliance makes you more conscious of it.
It is, however, a small quibble in what is a wonderful evening of dance, full of the transformative power of art itself.
Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until 19 January, then touring throughout 2020
