Review: RSC’s The Red Shoes: Fabulous in places, timid in others

The Red Shoes, Swan Theatre, Stratford, until 19th January

Four stars

Wouldn’t it be great if bad things happened to bad people? Once upon a time we used to believe they did but the final nail was surely hammered into the coffin of that most naïve of notions by the result of the recent US election.

Bad things do not happen to bad people. It’s wishful thinking.

And evidently there is no such thing as a just or vengeful God, karma is pure fantasy and nobody’s sins will be punished celestially, supernaturally or by any other hocus-pocus.Good things don’t happen to good people either but that won’t concern us until later in this review. Right now, let’s stick with the bad guys.

We’ve been conditioned since time immemorial to assume that the nice would prevail and the naughty would get what’s coming to them and it’s a bitter pill for most of us to swallow to realise we’ve been conned and such thinking was just a philosophical scheme concocted to keep us in obeyance.

Cheer up, though, you could have it worse. You could find yourself in director Kimberley Rampersad’s shoes being tasked with presenting a modernised take on an old fairy-tale the moral of which – that sinners pay the penalty for their sins – we simply don’t – can’t! - believe in anymore.

Not only that, but it’s been booked by the Swan to fill the jolly seasonal slot as its main attraction at Christmas – that most comforting of myths – when the play’s lead character serves penance for her perceived misdemeanours by having her feet chopped off!

It's no mean feat (pun intended) to make a fist of this and it’s to Rampersad’s credit that she almost achieves the impossible and delivers something that serves all the forces pulling in opposing directions. Almost.

The Red Shoes, written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1845, is one of those cautionary tales designed to keep kids obedient by scaring them with the consequences should they not do what they’re told which is obviously not a message that plays acceptably to a modern audience.

The story is about Karen, an orphan who disappoints her adoptive family by not behaving the way they think orphans ought to, her transgressions encouraged and enabled by a pair of magic shoes which help/make her flaunt etiquette and give her ideas above her station.

So, she is made to suffer for her vanity. But is she vain or is she spirited? That’s the conundrum. Make her too selfish and the brat loses our sympathy. Give her too much sparkle and you undermine the whole plot.

This production’s solution is to wobble somewhere down the middle, doing its best to swerve the question because it can’t decide. And so, unfortunately, neither can we.

Rampersad’s Red Shoes is splendidly entertaining and looks absolutely fabulous but it lightly skirts around rather than tackles head-on the elephant in the room while paying homage to the Powell/Pressburger 1948 ballet movie version which serves as a handy distraction.

Nikki Cheung, who plays Karen, is a trained dancer and she’s wonderful at it, her movement expressing more emotion than her acting which, considering the overall bind the production finds itself in, is completely understandable. At key moments, though, it can feel like an impasse over what exactly she’s supposed to be conveying which isn’t helpful to the audience searching where to invest some emotional interest.

One device by which Rampersand seeks to align the gothic with the glitz is to pepper the production with season-appropriate allusions. The magic mirror is imported from Snow White which adds nothing to the plot but provides some great campy fun, and the show also signposts another panto favourite when Karen encounters Kody Mortimer’s Prince, a shallow hunk straight out of Love Island (“My parents loved Purple Rain”) at a ball in the forest which leads to him attempting to fit one of the shoes under her petticoats and recoiling in disgust when he discovers her stumps – Cinderella through the looking glass no less.

She calls him “not deep”, he shrugs and swans off. Once again proof positive that wrong ‘uns don’t get their just deserts.It’s a decent enough smokescreen for the play’s unresolvable issues but it reminded me of Shrek’s swamp where Lord Farquaad had displaced a roster of unhappy fairy-tale characters and when Clive the family’s creepy son addicted to taxidermy enters toting a plastic bag full of the remains of a mashed-up neighbour’s cat, the fact that it’s not announced as the remains of Dick Whittington’s moggy feels positively negligent.

The other technique Rampersad employs to lead us off the scent is a wry fairy-dusting of knowing, plot-critiquing humour. Karen’s adoptive mother Mariella is played by Dianne Pilkington as a highly-strung cross between Alison Steadman in Abigail’s Party and a glammed-up younger version of Patricia Routledge in Keeping Up Appearances, a transparent social climber with deep well of self-esteem issues.

Of course, she’s the real vain one with lashings of gauche lines, echoed by her husband, James Doherty’s Bob, a business-obsessed bloke bored with his wife.

They make an amusing duo do the Nugents but they lean a little too heavily on the Wormwoods from Matilda which this play very obviously longs to be, or at least to emulate when it comes to commercial success.

Their son, the aforementioned Clive, is just OK as serial-killer-in-waiting but the scene where he lops off Karen’s tootsies with an axe is done in silhouette behind a sheet which is a bit more daft-looking than harrowing or dramatic (Austin Powers’ fans will doubtless get my drift).

While a cut or two above the RSC’s recent embarrassing Othello black-out murder, again there is a bit of uncertainty about how we’re supposed to react to what we’ve just witnessed and the hit-and-miss humour, while carried off well enough by the actors, feels a trifle forced, especially when they plonk a little Christmas tree around Karen-the-amputee’s bed and Bob gets shot down in flames by Mariella for inappropriately whittering on about Christmas stockings.

There are other opportunities over which this production is disappointingly timid. Shoes that are red carry a lot of symbolic baggage. The Pope wears red slippers to commemorate the blood that trickled down the feet of the crucified Christ and there’s also the suggestion of menstruation, the flowering of womanhood. This is another storyline almost pursued when Karen’s shoes get her dancing at the dinner table full of guests and she whisks Bob up in a tango to which he easily succumbs, his long-dormant virility briefly restored. But then, wisely, he talks himself out of getting involved in a Woody Allen situation and, a few suspicious glances from Mariella aside, the whole issue’s dropped.

That dinner scene, though, is fabulous – a slo-mo slaughter where the cutlery is magically weaponised. And, oh yeah, back to that good things not happening to good people thing, the play’s sole heart-of-gold character is Mags, the sickly, kindly old housekeeper played excellently by Sakuntala Ramaanee. She dies alone, deserted by Karen who’s skipped off from taking care of her to go dancing. See? Told you.

One of the production’s most intriguing and successful sleight of hands is to have Sebastian Torkia play three parts – our suave and sardonic master of ceremonies, a dodgy priest and Sylvestor the shoemaker who’s pretty much Satan by any other name. He makes for an attractive trio, a seductive tempter propagating good and evil as equally meretricious or of no merit at all.

It's a bit of a shame, then, that the unenviable task of tying up all the loose ends falls to him. As we’ve said, faced with the impossibility of delivering the tale’s original moral – it just wouldn’t be done to suggest that a young girl should be punished for pursuing her ambitions or acting on her desires – he’s forced to offer up this in its place: “You write your own ending when you dance your own dance”. So lame! (Yup, pun intended).

If I’d been charged with resolving all these messy doings and don’t-ings, I’d have sent the audience out into that good night with a blast of X-Ray Spex’ Poly Styrene ringing in their ears: “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but I think Oh bondage, up yours!”