The Red Shoes

Matthew Bourne, after Powell and Pressburger

New Adventures

Lowry, Salford

25-29 November, 2025: 2 hours 5 minutes

Beach belles in Monte Carlo: Matthew Bourne's production of The Red Shoes. All pics: Johan Persson

Matthew Bourne’s company is celebrating 30 years of life, and there could hardly be a better choice from his back catalogue than this – not only because it’s an original work rather than a re-creation of a classic ballet, and not only because it shows the life of a small touring ballet company (which his is) from the inside, but also because it captures the all-consuming love for dancing that every professional performer feels at heart.

The Red Shoes was a classic film of the late 1940s, starring Moira Shearer, about a girl torn between her love of dance – along with the demands of the Svengali-like boss of the ballet company she joins – and her love for a young composer.

So Matthew Bourne’s version, set at the time of the film (and evoking it with many touches and a sure sense of period), is a ballet based on a film about a ballerina (in the same way as Puccini’s Tosca is an opera based on a play about an opera singer). There’s a little bit of send-up in the scenes representing the company in performance – and at play when they perform in Monte Carlo – but not as much as in some of Bourne’s takes on Tchaikovsky ballets and others.

The ‘red shoes’ of the title are taken from the Hans Christian Andersen story about a spooky shoemaker’s gift that leads its owner to dance to her death – which becomes a complete one-act ballet within the film and is re-enacted in the tragic death of the heroine as she leaps under a train at the end. Here it’s similar: a ballet within the ballet.

The score is taken from the music of the late Bernard Herrmann (apart from a big chunk of Les Sylphides used in the early scenes – for which Chopin gets no credit, poor man). Those sufficiently long in the tooth may remember him on the Hallé podium as conductor, but Herrmann’s own music is remarkably varied and flexible (he wrote the scores for Psycho and Fahrenheit 451, among a string of major films), and here it breathes the spirit of the mid-20^th Century in its mix of lush Romanticism and striking “modern” dissonance.

We first saw this show in Salford in 2016, when  it was new, and what struck me then was that for Matthew Bourne it must have been a return to his first love: his original performing company was called Adventures in Motion Pictures, and his concept of dance is never far removed from the world of film.

The set includes a two-sided proscenium arch with curtains – reminiscent of the Royal Opera House’s – created by Lez Brotherston. It moves up and downstage and revolves while hanging from above – so instantly we are presented with both ballet performance and its backstage world.

The cast for last night’s opening included two leads who were in the roles they created back in 2016: Ashley Shaw as Vicky, the young heroine of the story – she was and is a great interpreter, fluent in style and expressive in self-revelation – and Glenn Graham as the martinet ballet master (a role taken in the film by the great Léonide Massine, who himself ran a company named Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, giving a virtuoso self-performance). Dominic North shone as Julian, the rehearsal pianist and composer with whom Vicky falls in love, and Andy Monaghan enjoyed playing the character of Boris the impresario.

But the entire company are top-notch – it’s a real ensemble piece, and Matthew Bourne provides some of his most seriously eloquent pas-de-deux creations to make it not just comic but both beautiful and touching.