The Red Shoes: lovely to look at – but this is no Matilda

Nikki Cheung in The Red Shoes, at the RSC Swan
Nikki Cheung in The Red Shoes, at the RSC Swan - Manuel Harlan

Under its capable new artistic directors – Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey – the RSC has programmed a decent spread for the festive period, but have they hit the bull’s eye in terms of family entertainment?

Not quite. At the Barbican, there’s the unseasonal if aptly silly A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Stratford main-stage has Twelfth Night, while the Swan is home to The Red Shoes, a newish take (first seen in 2017) on the sinister, and a little slight, Hans Christian Andersen tale.

In Shakespeare’s comedy, a pious steward is duped into wearing yellow stockings and cross-garters and comes a cropper. In The Red Shoes, at least in Andersen’s original telling (1845), an impious orphan girl, fixated with a pair of bewitching red shoes, is condemned to dance in them, finding salvation (even post-amputation) only through prayer and the grim mercy of death. We’re invited to laugh, albeit with a streak of pity, at Malvolio. But what attitude should we have to the benighted Karen?

Although her version was originally set in Ireland (and featured a young Paul Mescal as the fickle love-interest), Dublin playwright Nancy Harris here softens Andersen’s focus on religion (he made a church the site of the curse and its attempted lifting) and opts for a folkish, secular spin. Karen emerges as an independent spirit who learns to look after herself: the moral, after two darkly comic hours, being that “you write your own ending when you dance your own dance”.

In its favour, Canadian director/choreographer Kimberley Rampersad’s production – with lushly colourful costumes and set by Colin Redmond – is often spellbinding to look at, offering an enchanting mixture of live music, movement, dance and song. If not quite a musical it is, interestingly, like its heroine, sui generis. Harris freely consorts with other influences: there are shades of Cinderella and Snow White crossed with Matilda in the depiction of Nikki Cheung’s initially mute, grief-stricken Karen facing adoption by a ghastly (Northern) family called the Nugents.

The Red Shoes, at the RSC Swan
The Red Shoes, at the RSC Swan - Manuel Harlan

Dianne Pilkington is the model of vanity as she demands a talking mirror sings her praises, James Doherty, as her gone-to-seed hubby, wants to turn the local forest into a casino, while Joseph Edwards is their hypnotically horrible son, hellbent on animal butchery and DIY taxidermy. When Cheung comes out of her shell and performs a liberated, freeform dance, they sneer; the image of the lone artist versus the philistines.

Enticed to carpe crimson footwear, and tap into her defiant, expressive side by Sebastian Torkia’s conspiratorial, quasi Faustian, verse-mongering shoemaker, Cheung nimbly conveys being governed by the coveted shoes themselves (given a ghoulish twitching autonomy after the axe falls). Still it feels like a trick missed not to drag out the infernal agony of her enforced hoofing, some of the plotting looks like padding and the evening arguably lacks the wow-factor of Matthew Bourne’s dance-theatre version (based on the Powell and Pressburger classic). A qualified recommendation, then; a family outing to this needn’t involve dragged heels, but not everyone will leave with a spring in their step.

Until Jan 19; rsc.org.uk