Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes – Cinema Release

Picture: Roy Tan

Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes is launching in cinemas across the UK and Ireland from 30 September 2020. It was filmed at Sadler’s Wells in January 2020 in partnership with More2Screen.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Much of the latest tour of this show from the New Adventures has sadly been cancelled along with so many other wonderful things but Matthew Bourne’s glorious production is now coming to the cinema instead with nationwide screenings on 30 September and 4 October 2020.

It is also somewhat ironic that Bourne’s stage version of The Red Shoes has now become a cinema film. It is adapted from a legendary British Powell and Pressburger film from 1948, in itself based on a tale by Hans Christian Andersen in which a girl is given some red dancing shoes and then finds she can neither take them off nor stop dancing.

I heartily recommend watching both. I started to watch Bourne’s version and realised immediately how much more fully I would appreciate what he was doing if I also watched the earlier film which I had never seen. I realise that not all readers may be as curious as me about all this, I am a student of reception, a quite technical study of how stories are transformed over time by different creative processes, so this is all right up my street. It would be perfectly reasonable to watch and enjoy Bourne’s lovely production without knowing all the background. And obviously if you already know and love the film of old then this show is definitely right up your street too.

Watch an exclusive clip from Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes below featuring Michela Meazza as Irina Boronskaya and Liam Mower as Ivan Boleslawsky

Additionally, those who follow the annual film awards (as I also do) will have seen Thelma Schoonmaker honoured with a BAFTA fellowship last year. She is a film editor who has worked on all Martin Scorsese’s films and was married to Michael Powell, writer, director and producer, with Emeric Pressburger, of The Red Shoes film. Scorsese is also a big fan of The Red Shoes apparently, and he and Schoonmaker were instrumental in getting the film digitally restored.

Anyway to Bourne’s production itself. Adam Cooper returns to New Adventures after 20 years to play Boris Lermontov, director of a ballet company, a character apparently based in part on Sergei Diaghilev. He doesn’t dance much – and in the 1948 film Lermontov doesn’t dance at all – but it is certainly compelling when he does.

Into Lermontov’s company comes dancer Victoria Page, played by Ashley Shaw, and composer Julian Craster (Dominic North). The 1948 film cast dancers (including Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann who also choreographed the ballet in the film) as actors to create a ballet company and in this version the dancers also act but without words.

Together Page, Craster and Lermontov create a new ballet, The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story, which, marvellously, we get to see in its entirety. Wearing the red shoes makes Vicky want to keep dancing but at the same time she also falls in love with Julian and subsequently leaves the company, creating an impossible division in her life.

As Bourne says: “The main theme of The Red Shoes is love versus art, or career versus love.” Other major parts in the show are played by Michela Meazza, Glenn Graham and Liam Mower. Amongst many other comparisons, it is interesting to observe how much more time and space this production takes to explore certain emotional aspects of the story than in the original film – for a mixture of artistic, cultural and historical reasons. There is a scene with Vicky and Julian in single beds in the original film for example which becomes demonstrably more emotionally rich in Bourne’s hands.

The lush music for the show is by Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), a Hollywood composer and another intriguing artist. Herrmann also worked with Scorsese, Welles, Hitchcock and Harryhausen in his time. The music is arranged by contemporary composer, orchestrator and arranger Terry Davies.  Set and costumes are by Lez Brotherston, lighting by Paule Constable and sound design by Paul Groothuis.

This whole project, a wide-arching collaboration that spreads over time and distance, is fascinating to get involved in as a viewer. I wonder if any cinema is able to screen both films as a double bill. In the meantime you can find out about screenings of Matthew Bourne’s Red Shoes HERE.

Clare Walters

www.theredshoescinema.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1ga6wgQjNU