Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Director and Choreographer: Matthew Bourne

Orchestrator: Terry Davies

Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes, his ballet adaptation of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 British classic, first premiered nearly ten years ago, yet it still feels astonishingly alive as it comes to Edinburgh.

Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes revolves around the characters connected to Ballet Lermontov, an eminent travelling ballet company. An important part of the film is its internal production, The Ballet of the Red Shoes, which becomes a huge success. In adapting this story for the stage, Bourne brilliantly creates a compelling meta-ballet space, where The Red Shoes itself, the ballet performed by Ballet Lermontov, including The Ballet of the Red Shoes, and the dreamlike space lingering between stage and real life all come vividly alive. The story moves playfully and seamlessly between these worlds, transporting both the characters and the audience from one to another.

Lez Brotherston’s set design is superb. Centred around a curtain that hangs and shifts across the stage, it allows the space to transform fluidly into another theatre stage with audiences from within the story, a rehearsal room, Paris, London, or a dreamlike fairytale world suspended between the narrative and the ballet, where characters from The Ballet of the Red Shoes invade reality and disturb the mind of the ambitious protagonist Victoria Page, or Vicky. Paule Constable’s lighting draws us further into this strange and dangerous world, with a particularly brilliant use of spotlight to express ambition, desire, and shifting power between characters. Combined with Duncan McLean’s video and projection design, and of course Bourne’s own choreography, this creates a beautiful The Ballet of the Red Shoes that possesses both cinematic intensity and the elegance of ballet.

The touring cast is equally impressive. Cordelia Braithwaite’s Vicky is talented, troubled, fragile, and heartbreakingly beautiful. Andy Monaghan’s Boris Lermontov reveals a man with a far more complicated inner life than he first appears to have, while Jarrod McWilliams’ Julian Craster captures the immature passion and impulsiveness of his relationship with Vicky. Yet it is Liam Mower’s Grischa Ljubov who steals much of the attention. In the double role of Ballet Master and choreographer Grischa Ljubov, and the man offering the red shoes in The Ballet of the Red Shoes, his performance is thrilling and dangerous.

Still, it is 2026, and although time has not diminished the greatness of either Bourne’s work or Powell and Pressburger’s original, this remains a cautionary tale in which an ambitious woman pursues art, chooses an artistic life over her lover and, arguably, over a more traditional heterosexual model of domestic life, only to be punished for it. That tension is difficult to ignore now. When one thinks of more recent screen stories such as Hamnet (2025) and Sentimental Value (2025), both centred on male protagonists sacrificing family life and the duty of caring for their children in pursuit of great art, the contrast of the outcome is striking. In those stories, men are allowed forgiveness, reconciliation, and, ultimately, redemption. Their wives or daughters forgive them because they have created great art. The difference in outcome seems, at times, to rest simply on gender.

It is hardly a coincidence that art created by men is so often treated as great, while women who chase career ambition are more often depicted as dangerous or as wanting too much. Even in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, when the couple run away, it is Vicky’s career that collapses into disgrace. This is not a moral judgement on the remarkable artists behind either the film or the stage adaptation. After all, the story is nearly eighty years old and was shaped by the values of its time. But it is equally important to remember that, as a cautionary tale, it is also constructed by the ideas and institutions of that period, many of which we have since moved beyond.

Even so, Bourne’s adaptation of this modern British classic remains one of the best shows in town. The talent, ambition, and sheer effort involved in bringing it to audiences across the UK prove Chalamet wrong.

Runs until Sat 18 Apr 2026 | Image: Manuel Harlan