REVIEW: The Red Shoes at Newcastle Theatre Royal
Bourne on form again
Gorgeousness is what Matthew Bourne fans have come to expect and this production duly delivers, with sumptuous costumes, clever sets and crisp choreography brilliantly executed.
A large first-night audience lapped it up, me among them (although I also loved The Midnight Bell, a bit of a Bourne outlier spun from bleak, sepia-tinted source material, the stories of Patrick Hamilton, yet translated to the stage last year with characteristic panache).
As a friend remarked: “Matthew Bourne hasn’t so much captured the market as created it.”
It’s hard to dispute.
First performed on this stage in 2017, The Red Shoes is running for a fortnight – as will his Cinderella this time next year – and in between comes The Car Man, Bourne’s early Carmen spin-off revived and heading our way in September.
There will be seven performances of The Car Man. But no-one is likely to be complaining about too much Bourne.
Rambert, here in June and celebrating their centenary, only offer two performances while Northern Ballet, coming in October with Cinderella performed to live music, manage six.
Matthew Bourne shows have recorded music, which is a shame in a way, particularly in a production like The Red Shoes which is a dance show about a ballet company in which music (here largely inspired by the work of Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann) plays a major part.
But in another way, an orchestra would mean disappointment because seats would have to be removed and ticket prices, since Bourne is of the commercial rather than the subsidised world, would no doubt rise.
What Bourne and designer Lez Brotherston, his long-time accomplice in the New Adventures company, have is an unerring eye for the visually arresting.
This show opens at the ballet, with a man – ramrod straight, evening dress, slicked hair, straight from the 1940s heyday of Powell and Pressburger – stepping into a spotlight.
It’s an image reminiscent of a Jack Vettriano painting, he having been another with the populist touch.
The film of The Red Shoes, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, was a box office hit of 1948, making a star of Moira Shearer who played Victoria (Vicky) Page, the girl chosen to play the lead in a fictional new ballet called The Red Shoes.
It’s based on Hans Christian Andersen’s gruesome fairytale in which a girl called Karen acquires fabulous red shoes which won’t let her stop dancing, even unto death, as punishment for her vanity.
It all means there’s a lot to unpick in an adaptation with no words (the odd gasp is allowed) to aid in the telling of the story.
At the end of the first act, when the ballet within the ballet ends and the curtain falls, I sensed some around me preparing to rise for the interval. But that, of course, is not quite the end of act one.
Bourne, though, as he has shown many times, is a master of visual storytelling and the plight of Vicky, with her passion for ballet and her rival suitors, carries us through to a final moment of tragic melodrama and loud applause (all audience-generated this time rather than augmented over the speakers, as when the curtain falls on the fictional ballet).
Even should you lose the thread, this production is eye candy from start to finish with a series of wonderful tableaux, a seductive scene from Monte Carlo, all swim suits and beachballs, contrasting with the humour of a London music hall and the wild drama of a tempest.
All the dancers are wonderful, with Cordelia Braithwaite leading the line as Vicky, and adept at making sustained effort seem effortless while radiating personality and emotion in time-honoured New Adventures style.
I do hope they’re treated better than their fictional counterparts in the company run by tyrannical Boris Lermontov.
The Red Shoes runs until Saturday, May 9. Tickets from the Theatre Royal website.