The cinema has always been a prime inspiration for Matthew Bourne: his original dance company, we may remember, was called Adventures in Motion Pictures; the current troupe is New Adventures. The flavour and technique of film resonate in many of his productions, as well as allusions to specific movies. Now, just premiered, comes his latest spectacular, The Red Shoes, running for a long season at Sadler’s Wells. Here, he has adapted Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 classic, one of the most famous films about dance and dancers, and looks to have another big hit to his credit.
It’s credit shared with his regular creative team of collaborators, and, as always, the designer Lez Brotherston provides visual delights and ingenious devices. An ornate theatre proscenium, gilt with red velvet curtains, represents the opera houses of Covent Garden and Monte Carlo, where the Ballet Lermontov, a touring company in the late 1940s, perform. The arch revolves and travels to give views of the dancers on stage, backstage or off stage. It offers swiftly changing perspectives or cinematic cross-cutting and clever contrast. Paule Constable’s lighting is integral to the success.
Bourne’s choreography and storytelling move with pace, juxtaposing ensembles with intimate scenes. As in the original film, the heroine, Victoria Page, who has ambitions to be a great dancer, is nurtured and controlled by the ballet impresario Boris Lermontov, but falls in love with the talented young composer Julian Craster. Her struggle between human love and dancing on the possessive Lermontov’s terms precipitates tragedy. Real life reproduces the plot of The Red Shoes ballet, the work they have created: the ballerina’s shoes have a grim will of their own, and lead her on an unstoppable dance to death.
The music is an arrangement by Terry Davies of concert pieces and suites from film scores by the Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann, and Bourne’s choice proves a great success. It is atmospheric, dramatic, lush or dreamy as required, and excellently played by the orchestra under Brett Morris’s baton, though Paul Groothuis’s sound design, as usual in Bourne’s productions, indulges in overamplification. (Why do they forget that Sadler’s Wells is not an arena?) In contrast to Herrmann’s early works, the ballet of The Red Shoes uses music from the 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, more futuristic, with unusual instruments; and this sequence has a different design style from the “real world” of the main settings — stark grey arches, with effective monochrome projections by Duncan McLean that locate this part of the work in the realm of fantasy.
In the first of three alternating casts, Ashley Shaw gives a subtle, affecting performance as Vicky, torn by her conflicting emotions, dancing with spirit and elegance. Sam Archer is the suave, doting Lermontov, with a streak of cruelty in his single-minded pursuit of art at the expense of human feeling; and Chris Trenfield is the ardently adoring Julian. Bourne creates a variety of expressive pas de deux for the lovers, and strong trios for the battle of wills and emotions.
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There are rewarding opportunities for other dancers, too, with all the egos and eccentricities to be found in a ballet company. Michela Meazza plays the glamorous prima ballerina Irina Bornskya, whose foot injury gives Vicky her chance (one break leading to another). Before that, we have a witty scene of Bornskya in a fur coat, rehearsing Les Sylphides with the premier danseur Ivan Boleslawsky in a dressing gown, with a cigarette. Liam Mower has camp fun with this part — much flouncing — but he also has plenty of other dance opportunities, including a crisply athletic solo in Ballon de plage, a Ballet Lermontov piece in delicious beach costumes that brings to mind Bronislava Nijinska’s Le Train bleu, for Diaghilev.
Characteristically, Bourne turns in lively ensembles such as the party scene at Villefranche-sur-Mer, with its texture of period social dances. He makes pastiche allusions to other ballets and choreographers — as in a wittily extravagant “modern” creation, Concerto macabre, which is the title of a Herrmann piece. One of his departures from the film story is to show Vicky and Julian, exiled from the Ballet Lermontov, reduced to dancing and playing the piano in an East End musical (tacky in Brotherston’s design), where the other numbers include a male duo in a Sand Dance that parodies the cod-Egyptian act Wilson, Keppel and Betty, though here without a Betty. Depressed in their dingy digs, they are juxtaposed (by a flick of the proscenium curtain) with Lermontov, in Monte Carlo, agonising over a golden sculpture of Vicky’s foot en pointe.
The Red Shoes ends tragically, as we know it must, with Vicky’s helpless shoe-impelled rush into the path of a train. Bravo Brotherston, again. Bourne’s creation is packed with dancing and invention, it successfully intermingles reality with fantasy, there’s never a dull moment, and it comes in at the ideal length of two hours.
The Red Shoes, Sadler’s Wells, London EC1, until Jan 29; touring until May 20