Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes is a dark triumph

There’s always a sense of anticipation about a Matthew Bourne show, particularly at Christmas. His New Adventures company has booked a berth at Sadler’s Wells at this time of year since 2002, with a year off for Covid. It is always packed, with audiences confident they will have a good time.

Yet what Bourne offers is not (apart from his Nutcracker) festive or particularly seasonal. There’s a darkness at the heart of a lot of his work and it’s that sense of genuine drama that attracts. This is dance that tells brilliant, entrancing stories.

The Red Shoes, first seen in 2016 and much polished since, plays to his strengths. Based on the 1948 film by Powell and Pressburger, it is a disturbing tale of obsession – of a woman’s passion for dance that ultimately overwhelms her. It asks all kinds of challenging questions about the balance between life and art and the borderline between them. It’s also, in Bourne’s hands, a glorious love letter to the style of the 1940s, when ballet was sweeping across Britain and Europe as a communicative art form.

In the key line in the film, the impresario Boris Lermontov, a Diaghilev-like figure of dedication and drive, asks star-in-the-making Victoria Page: “Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?”, she answers. Bourne’s richly varied choreography brilliantly conjures that heady, restless sense of constant devotion to the art of dance.

The cast are perpetually in motion, rehearsing, performing, while Lez Brotherston’s gleaming proscenium arch, placed centre-stage, whisks our viewpoint around, showing both behind and in front of the scenes. There are lovely touches of humorous detail: cardigans are pulled tight, cigarettes smoked and discarded, the prima ballerina (on the second press night, an imperious Michela Meazza) rehearses in the spotlight holding her tulle dress on a hanger.

As the action breezes around the world from post-war London to sunny Monte Carlo (all beach balls and acrobatics in tribute to Bronislava Nijinska’s Le Train Bleu) the story unfolds with the same fluency. Lovely Victoria (Cordelia Braithwaite, red hair blazing like Moira Shearer’s in the movie) becomes a star ballerina, falls for the composer Julian Craster (Leonardo McCorkindale) and triumphs in a ballet called “The Red Shoes”, about a woman who dances herself to death. Both are nurtured by Lermontov (Andy Monaghan), who stands constantly apart in the shadows, then rejected when their love for each other threatens his plans for his beloved company.

By the time they are reduced to performing in seedy East End music halls, giving Bourne a chance to choreograph a comic dance for two fez-wearing men and bring on disillusioned chorus girls and a lascivious ventriloquist, tragedy beckons and Vicky is propelled towards her doom. An extraordinary, savage bedroom duet, in which she puts on the red shoes in almost erotic fascination, marks the end.

The changing moods and scenes are lit by Paule Constable with a painterly touch and sharp spotlighting, so that the intensity of the feelings – of Victoria’s isolation as she loses herself in dance – are literally highlighted. The music too, a selection of Bernard Herrmann’s film scores orchestrated by Terry Davies, surges with emotion.

The whole thing is danced with conviction by the entire cast, who find each beat of the story. The high point is the ballet-within-a-ballet – a tribute both to Herrmann and to his collaborator Alfred Hitchcock, where Braithwaite’s frail, frightened Vicky is driven through a series of grey, shadowy landscapes by the shoes that force her to dance. There’s something magical about the sequence, which – similar to that in Christopher Wheeldon’s An American in Paris – represents the love this generation of dance-makers have for their predecessors.

Audience anticipation is rewarded. It’s a triumphant, compelling show.

The Red Shoes is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until January 18, then touring

Photographs by Johan Persson