Review: THE RED SHOES, Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon

In an age when children are protected from psychological discomfort not by the hard work involved in carefully building their resilience, but by shielding their sight (increasingly at state level), it’s bracing to be reminded of just how brutal the fairytales read to us by parents of the 70s can be. And few come bleaker than Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes.  

This man is no twinkle-eyed scamp (as mythologised in the 1952 Hollywood musical by a gambolling Danny Kaye), but a censorious Dane allocating blame and punishment to a girl who just wanted to dance, to assert a little youthful joy into a hard, hard world. It’s ripe for (yet another) re-telling, but can Nancy Harris (writer) and Kimberley Rampersad (director and choreographer) make it work for an audience in which even grandparents may only have known Andersen’s work through Disney’s bowdlerised U-certificate fare?

Colin Richmond’s set greets us all but dripping blood in its all-enveloping red hue, evoking Game of Thrones’ infamous Red Wedding - we can be sure that we’re not in Kansas now. After a brief framing from the pantomime-ish narrator (Sebastien Torkia), whose rhyming couplets soon grate, we’re off into territory that has plenty of Dickens, plenty of callbacks to other fairytales, but oh so little charm.

That’s the inevitable result of making almost every character a villain without (at least until deep into a very long two and a half hours) revealing any redeeming features they may have suppressed. 

Dianne Pilkington is not invited to find the fun in a stock evil stepmother (Mariella) who would surely rein in that Liverpool accent as part of her strategy to ingratiate herself into middle class society - after all, she’s certainly changed her fashion sense. (Believe me, if my mother adopted a toned down Scouse in answering the phone, so would Mariella).

James Doherty's Bob is a skin-crawling creep, a rapacious, predatory husband and Joseph Edwards plays their son, Clive, as a straight down the line sadist. It’s not just disconcerting to spend so much time in the presence of such characters in an unlikely family Christmas show, it’s positively unpleasant - you feel the need for a cleansing shower by the interval, never mind the curtain.

The sociopathic trio are offset only partially by the warmish relationship that grows between Karen (Nikki Cheung), who is adopted into the dysfunctional household to gain favour with the great and good on the board of an orphans’ charity, and Mags (Sankuntala Ramanee), the ageing housekeeper and the only adult we meet with any empathy at all. Neither is quite what the other needs, and we want a bit more too. 

Cheung is a ballet dancer and much the best moments of the show come when she gives free rein to her expressive movement, allowing us a glimpse of both her longing to escape the prison of her emotionally stunted life and find a world in which self-expression is valued rather than crushed. 

But even that ray of sunshine is subverted when she meets Sylvestor, the narrator now a dodgy shoemaker whose magic is more malevolent than magnanimous. Soon the titular shoes have a mind of their own turning Karen into Carrie, her telekinesis firing cutlery into eyes. She comes to the conclusion that her beloved shoes need excising from her life, and I mean excising.

I was continually expecting an Into The Woods style musical to burst out of the pedestrian script but, despite some fine music (by Marc Teitler), it never came except in a curious interlude that brought unwanted flashbacks to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s flop, Bad Cinderella. The other musical that continually came to mind was Salad Days. an altogether more joyous account of involuntary dancing - oh for a little of that lightness of touch.

Somehow a second pair of red shoes appears and the mutilated Karen can dance again and I was left unsure about how Paralympian athletes would react to a message that appeared to suggest they required magic to be liberated, but matters seemed so confused by then that my reading may be awry.

So go for the movement and the spectacle, but do not expect romance, suspense or coherence from a production that should perhaps have stayed in the forest with Clive and his dismembered cats. 

The Red Shoes at the Swan Theatre, RSC, Stratford-Upon-Avon until 19 January 2025

Photo images: Manuel Harlan

Photpersad Kimberley Rampers

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