In a season brimming with holiday glitz, the Royal Shakespeare Company offers a refreshing twist on seasonal enchantment with their bewitching new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes. This haunting fairytale of a girl spellbound by magical shoes that force her to dance uncontrollably springs to life in a visually sumptuous production that blends Shakespearean flair with raw folkloric power.
A Fairytale Flooded in Scarlet
From the moment you enter the Swan Theatre, you’re immersed in designer Colin Richmond’s wraparound world drenched in red light. The fluffy, velvety edges of the stage evoke the plush interior of a colossal slipper – or perhaps, as some disputed interpretations of Cinderella’s glass slipper suggest, a veiled allusion to the heroine’s own interior landscape. This enveloping warmth belies the tale’s dark undercurrents, softening rather than sharpening the story’s visceral edge.
Bursting into Ballet
Amidst this scarlet cocoon unfolds playwright Nancy Harris’s polite, naturalistic take on Andersen’s macabre tale. More social satire than psychological horror, Harris’s adaptation spends much of its time on starchy family dinners and attempts to tame the unruly orphan heroine. But halfway through, Nikki Cheung bursts onto the stage in a whirl of motion, a ragged black tutu spiraling around her as she spins and leaps. Trained in ballet, Cheung abandons words to let her body speak, bending and pulling away, both luring spectators in and wrenching herself from their grasp. In this frenzied dance, choreographed by director Kimberley Rampersad, the evening suddenly ascends to another plane.
Groans rose from the audience as the heroine’s feet were hacked off in shadow play.
Glimpses of the Unconscious
Faithful to the original, the RSC’s heroine does suffer the grisly fate of having her enchanted feet axed off. But these flashes of primal brutality punctuate an otherwise prim tale intent on stitching Andersen’s unraveling symbols into narrative coherence. The production shies away from the illogical leaps and untethered imagination that give fairytales their eerie, electric charge. Compare this to the wildness of Kate Bush’s feverish music video for her song “The Red Shoes”, with its dizzying collision of ecstasy and terror, and one senses the heights this unfettered fable can reach when fully unleashed.
Haunting Memories
Still, there are moments of indelible theatricality that linger long after the curtain falls. Director Emma Rice’s open-air staging for Kneehigh at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in 2000 remains etched in my mind, the image of disembodied shoes chasing the heroine, blood-red ribbons streaming in their wake. Powell and Pressburger’s surreal 1948 film hauntingly evoked a dancer torn between romantic and artistic passion. These are the versions that dance on the edge of the unconscious, the unruly realm of fairytales.
The Power of Untamed Enchantment
For all its restraint, the RSC’s The Red Shoes builds to a striking final tableau, the blood-red stage slashed by a lightning bolt of blinding light. It’s as if the production, in its final moments, surrenders to the violent, transfiguring power it has held at bay, offering a tantalizing glimpse of the primal energy thrumming beneath the surface. As Andersen knew, there’s something untameable in the best fairytales that defies logic and animates the darkest recesses of the soul. While this Red Shoes may be too well-mannered to fully unbind that unruly magic, its bewitching flashes of visual and choreographic brilliance still cast a lingering spell.
