London, 3 December 2025
She Dies For Love
Who among us wouldn’t dance to the death? Slip our feet into scarlet satin, curl lambswool around the toes, cross the ribbons tight and fly?
Brass and woodwind are cleared, strings and bows tightened. In the wings, dancers press into resin and practise pirouettes. The stage manager calls for scenery and props. Boris pulls Vicky towards him and tells her,
“Music is all that matters, nothing but the music”.
The curtain lifts for Matthew Bourne’s ballet based on the Red Shoes film.
In strong gale force winds and rain flooding the pavements, the red box entrance of Sadler’s Wells shines out. This is a tragedy, as bleak as any by Hans Christian Andersen, so why show it this month? Matthew’s New Adventures company has popularised ballet by taking famous films and rewriting traditional classics for the Strictly generation. It is an alternative to The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty, without children and witches, no prince obliged to kiss and marry a princess. The Red Shoes is one of the top 3 British films ever made. It is the pursuit of a dream, passion, madness, sacrifice. What more could a British audience want?
The ballet opens in typical style with the tiara-clad class showing off at a ball. And it has the usual ending, the death of a betrayed woman. So, is it worth travelling to Angel and paying a high cost for tickets? Yes! It will delight you and remind you to nourish the passions within. My £50 seat in the gods provided a breathtaking tableau.
The setting is lavish, red and black, with a central, pivoting curtain to show front and backstage. Ballet is interspersed with waltz, cha cha and tango. The music is compiled from ‘golden age’ Bernard Herrmann film scores, especially Fahrenheit 451, orchestrated by Terry Davies. A harp quietens us into night, while other strings are at times asymphonic and Hitchcockian.
Every dancer tonight was superb. Cordelia Braithwaite was our Vicky, Andy Monaghan – Boris, Leonardo McCorkindale as Julian. Grisha, Ivan, all the company, danced light and precise, just 2 nights into a 6-month UK tour.
Like the film, this ballet is not about Hans Christian’s Karen, or even about the ballerina Vicky (originally Sadler’s Wells own Moira Shearer) chosen to dance Karen’s role. Our focus is Boris Lermontov, part Diaghilev, part movie mogul. His motif is silence, an absence of music, which feels strange in a ballet. We see his evil heart when acting the film’s shoemaker, an echo of von Rothbart, or Jack Frost from the irresistible The Snowman opening tomorrow.
And the shoes? One small pair of pointe shoes, made with the same hardboard, straw, satin and glue like the thousands of others that have graced this stage, except these glow red. They are a trap to ensnare a high-earning woman, blinded by her love of music and dance. She will never be a star, just the captive muse of powerful men.
The shoes make an entrance half-way through Act 1. The setting is a 1940s music hall where the crowd peels back from a fallen dancer, desperately trying to remove her shoes. She is carried by the wind in my favourite scene. The harp brings winter, there is snow, all the dancers are dressed in storm-cloud black. Boris as puppet-master, pulls at red ribbons draped around his neck. He turns his back on her pleas, extending a Zeus-silhouetted hand across the sky. He pushes her away, clenches his fist and drops her. A priest appears beside the ready grave.
Recorded thunderous applause overwhelm our own united appreciation for the excellent dancing in The Red Shoes mini-ballet within this show.
Act 2 brings a most enviable tango in Villefrance-sur-Mer and lovely pas de deux on a balcony over the Med. Vicky’s next years are in the East End of London, finding parts in Vaudeville music halls. The male dancers grab at her, usually in tease. It is their own buttock slapping they prefer, Morecambe and Wise-style in pantomime season.
Boris is wrapped in his scarlet velvet smoking jacket, music and lighting demand pity for his plight. Centre stage, phallic, stands a decapitated ankle and calf above a foot en pointe, cast in bronze. He reclines on his chaise, falls from it and smokes at the bronze. This ballet must have been sponsored by Philip Morris with so much extended smoking on stage.
Vicky has become an irritant for both Boris and her composer husband Julian. Julian slams angry chords, his mouth kissing only his cigarette as ash falls free between the piano keys. When he is not watching, Vicky dares to open her case to stroke her ballet shoes. She dons them to fight back, unwisely left untied, all the easier for Julian to pull them from her feet. She is left with nothing to hold – no music, no shoes, no hope of happiness.
While some of the audience laughed, others felt our diaphragms crushed to see ballet shoe ribbons tied into a noose, beckoning the dancer, threatening her, before being snatched away.
The corps are back in black, tutus feathered in tatters as if crows at a kill. A train hoots. Slow claps mimic the train on the tracks. We know how this will end. A woman no longer needed descends to madness. Vicky does not die of a broken heart after being abandoned by the man she loves, as in so many ballets and operas. Nor does she dance herself to death. Love devours her. With the removal of music, her ability to express her love through dance, life ends.
Matthew writes in the programme, “The main message of The Red Shoes is that nothing matters but art.”
This denies the truth of Vicky’s heart. There was no choice of art or love. Music and dance are her love, the spirit that drove her life. Denying her that is what killed her.
The film and this ballet are about jealousy and male violence towards women. This is as removed from the world of ballet as the Black Swan film. Women do not dance to inspire men, nor exist to serve them. Ballet is devotion to music, not masochism. Perhaps by the 2nd centenary of Hans Christian publishing The Red Shoes, and certainly by the 1st centenary of the film, a woman choreographer might offer a new ballet to tell Vicky’s story.
Will you be one of the 1500 people in ruby slippers at Sadler’s Wells tonight? And on the buses and trains pulling away from Angel, humming the melody, clasping your programme? Determined to find a pointe class close to home the next day?
As David Bowie wrote: “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues!”
If you have never strapped your feet into pointe shoes, slept in them to mould them to your arches, now is the time. Pull the weight high off your toes and step lightly to Sadler’s Wells for two hours of London’s finest music, dance and entertainment.
Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures performs The Red Shoes at Sadler’s Wells until 18 January 2026, before touring the UK until 9 May 2026.
By Tracey Chippendale-Gammell
Photo by Author