Milton Keynes Theatre Review: Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes

Summary

Rating: ★★★★★

Running dates: Tuesday 10 Feb – Saturday 14 Feb

Where to see it: Milton Keynes Theatre

Duration: 2 hours including 20 minute interval

Review

Ballet can be an acquired taste. Mention ballet to many people and they conjure up an image of cute little girls in tutus or young men and women twirling around a stage to music. They know it’s trying to tell a story but find it hard to fathom. Classical ballet was inaccessible to most and, dare I say, a bit boring to many. It was a niche style that slowly dying out.

Then along comes Mathew Bourne and over his many award winning and commercially successful productions he has transformed the genre and expanded its appeal to a whole new audience. He combines ballet with modern dance together with great staging, lighting, costumes and dramatic music to create a more sensory and accessible experience for a newly devoted audience.

There is no surprise that The Red Shoes alone has won 2 Olivier Awards and was honoured by the LA critics awards for both choreography and set and costume design.

The origin of The Red Shoes is a dark fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson about a girl who becomes obsessed with dancing, symbolised by her red shoes, and dances herself to death.

This idea was developed into an award winning 1948 film called The Red Shoes by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which later inspired Matthew Bourne to transform this story of obsession into something magical, beautiful, very creative and full of romance. 

At its heart, the story is about artistic ambition and obsession and the conflicts it creates especially when it comes to love.  Victoria Page, played by the fantastic Cordelia Braithwaite is an aspiring dancer who joins the Lermontov Ballet. As her career develops and she is promoted to the leading dancer she falls in love with Julian Craster, the Ballet company’s composer played by the charming and handsome Dominic North. 

Boris Lermontov, Ballet Impresario played by Andy Monaghan, also passionately loved Victoria but only for her ability as a dancer. Boris is obsessed by the art and believes Victoria’s love for Julian will undermine her performance. The red shoes she wears are the visual symbol of the obsession that they share.

Victoria refuses to give up Julian and the pair flee back to London where they eke out a living in musical theatre alongside clowns and ventriloquists. She soon realises that she cannot live without pursuing her true passion and so returns to the Lermontov Ballet.  She puts on the red shoes and dances once again but ultimately her obsession with her art and the agony she feels for the sacrifice she has made to achieve it lead to tragic consequences. 

The story is told via a ballet within a ballet as the Lermontov ballet prepares its production of The Red Shoes. It starts with the aspiring dancer beginning her career in Covent Garden then Paris, Monte Carlo and back to the music halls of East London. 

The show cleverly uses a revolving Proscenium Arch as a tool to show both the glamour of the dancers on stage and the hard work that that the public don’t see in creating the production. It also enabled them to rapidly change the location of different scenes and to enable scenes to be shown in quick succession without the need for a major set change. This certainly worked well and added more drama to the scenes. 

Every scene added to the story with much energy, dramatic music, colour and grace. The costumes matched the period and also what would have been popular in France and England at that time. I can see why awards were given for costume.

I particularly liked the French café scene where the women wore lovely black lacy sleeves and black flowing velvet skirts so when they were so gracefully dancing it added to the beauty of the scene. The men also boldly and gracefully danced round tables and moved tables in time to the music. 

Another favourite of mine was the scene set on a cold windy winter’s night and the dancers were the trees moving in the wind. It was so cleverly done, their legs and arms were moving like branches of trees on a windy day.

All the way through the compelling story was told with so much grace and the most wonderful ballet lines. The energy, colour and dramatic music tell this beautiful and tragic story. 

I can’t recommend this enough. If you are a dance fan go for the dance. If not go for the colour,  spectacle and drama.