Article by:
Judith Mackrell
When I’m watching a film or play,” says Matthew Bourne, “there’s always a part of me that’s wondering: ‘Could this be a show?’ When I’m browsing through a bookshop, I’m always looking for titles. But I have to really love something if I’m going to make it into a dance. I have to know that I can take a work that people love – and make them love it in a different way.”
Making audiences fall in love with the unexpected has become Bourne’s calling card. Over the years, he’s refashioned ballet classics and popular movies in his own imaginative and irreverent image. With such works as his funny and homoerotic Swan Lake, he’s attracted a whole new audience to contemporary dance and made himself a household name. But despite his past successes, Bourne knows that he’s taken on a monumental challenge with his latest project: an adaptation of the Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes.
Not only does this 1948 masterpiece rank as the greatest dance film ever, it’s widely considered a cinematic gem. It brings an almost Faustian grandeur to the story of aspiring ballerina Vicky Page, as she’s forced to make her impossible choice between love and art. The cast, including Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann, have become the stuff of legend, while the cinematography is regarded as a benchmark of skill and invention as the film weaves its brilliant, disconcerting path between fantasy and realism.
The obvious question for Bourne, when I meet him during a rare break from his rehearsal schedule, is what he can possibly add. He’s grabbing a late Sunday breakfast, and he smiles thoughtfully as he considers his reply. “The film does have that quality of being a monument, but I think you change something straight away when you take it from screen to stage. And, even though I’ve followed the film quite closely, I’ve been able to see lots of ways of expanding on it through dance. There will be quite a few surprises along the way.”
One area where Bourne has let his imagination run riot is in choreographing the life of the ballet company Page belongs to. In the film, the company is run by Boris Lermontov, a steely aesthete and ruthless boss who has shades of the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. But while Bourne has retained the character of Lermontov, he’s given the company a new identity, one that bears a distinct resemblance to the Royal Ballet back in 1948, when it was still known as Sadler’s Wells Ballet. The company had just emerged from the war years when it went slogging around Britain entertaining the public and the troops. For Bourne, it seemed to have something of the improvised, mongrel quality of his own troupe, New Adventures.
“It was a company I felt we could relate to, even though we’re not a ballet company ourselves. When we were building up the background and the characters in the story, I had my dancers research the lives of English dancers like Beryl Grey. Vicky, of course, is a little bit Margot Fonteyn and, although the audience doesn’t have to know about those connections, they make the work a bit richer.”
Bourne has also aimed for historical authenticity in the works he’s created for Page and the Lermontov company, referencing the kind of mid-20th-century repertory that Sadler’s Wells Ballet would have danced. There’s a pastiche of Frederick Ashton’s Dante Sonata, as well as “a beach ballet and a more waltzy old-fashioned kind of ballet”. Bourne relished the stylistic challenges of creating this work, including the fact that some of it has to be danced on pointes.
“I’ve always resisted that, but I realised I had to have it here.” He particularly had to have pointe shoes in the Red Shoes, the ballet that turns Page into a star but also precipitates her tragedy. As in the film, it’s based on the strange and sinister fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, but Bourne says he had “a lot of fun” inventing a brand new choreographic language for it. “I wanted this ballet to look as if it was something a little bit futuristic for those times. The whole set changes, we go into a different world.”
But the most satisfying challenge has been portraying the intense triangular relationship between Lermontov, Page and Julian Craster, the composer Page falls in love with. “The more I’ve watched the film, the more I’ve realised how messy that relationship is. Vicky and Julian fall in love while they’re working together on the Red Shoes ballet and, really, they’re only happy together inside that burst of creativity. Afterwards, it doesn’t work so well and I’ve actually found myself sympathising with Lermontov’s position: that love and art don’t always go together.”
Bourne also recognised that there were layers to Page’s individual character that needed to be explored. “She’s actually quite calculating and forthright – much tougher than the Natalie Portman character in Black Swan. I’ve tried to show that side of her. There are two small scenes in the film between her and Julian that I’ve expanded into longer duets. It’s been quite new for me to get to grips with all that complexity, all those different motivations.”
If Bourne regards this production as a significant new phase in his dance-making, he says he’s been inspired by his music, which he thinks will be one of the “biggest revelations of the show”. The film’s original score was not adequate to his needs, so he and his regular collaborator Terry Davies investigated the works of Bernard Herrmann. “There is so much of his music that hasn’t been used in the theatre, concert pieces and film scores. It has a bittersweet quality, full of feeling. We’ve used some of the music from Citizen Kane, would you believe, and Fahrenheit 451. Terry has arranged it into a full-length score. I’m very excited about it.”
The work of Bourne’s other long-term collaborator, the designer Lez Brotherston, has been equally important: creating sets that shift the location from London to Monte Carlo to the fantasy land of the Red Shoes, producing a vast wardrobe of costumes for the 24 dancers. “It’s crazy, we’ve got more costumes for this show than any other. Lez is brilliant but we’ve had to work hard to keep him inside the budget.”
Calculating the cost of a production like The Red Shoes, as well as creating its story and choreography, is a massive undertaking and Bourne does sometimes wonder if he can bear to put himself through it all. “You’re always fighting with yourself, worried about repeating yourself, wondering if you can get away with a trick that you’ve used before.” At 56, he has an impressive body of work – not only for New Adventures but also in musical theatre – but he feels suddenly aware of being one of the oldest choreographers working in Britain.
He gives a rueful grin when he admits that being awarded a knighthood this year has made him feel his age. “I’m just beginning to get used to it but it seems to have brought a lot of responsibility. I find I have to be careful what I say – or tweet – because people are much more likely to report on it. It’s like I’ve become an authority, the voice of dance.”
But these worries seem to fade away when he launches into a list of his future plans. He wants to mount a brand new Swan Lake (“some of it will look very different”) and he’s in discussions with Sadler’s Wells for a small experimental work to be shown in its new 500-seat theatre. Despite feeling the strain of creating The Red Shoes, Bourne acknowledges that these large-scale productions are where his heart lies. “New Adventures has grown so much over the last 20 years, but it still feels like family to me. It still has that freshness of spirit. And the truth is I like making big shows for big audiences. I always have.”
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