Hans Christian Andersen’s dark fairytale about a girl obsessed with dancing is enthralling if you ignore its dated moral warning about the dangers of female “vanity” and disobedience. Karen loves dancing so much she is, literally, carried away by her shoes. This version by Nancy Harris promises to bring the story into the 21st century. Is it enough to do that by putting characters into modern dress?
Marc Teitler’s music is lovely and Colin Richmond’s set and costumes are exquisite. But beneath the attractively modernised surface, the story upholds the old morality, undermining it only in the last lines of the play, and not in a way that resolves its core sadism toward a girl who dares to look in the mirror and have “notions about herself”. There is no attempt to bridge the gulf between the Christian notion of vanity that Andersen wrote about and our selfie-obsessed culture either.
“Sixteen is a dangerous age,” the shoemaker (Sebastien Torkia) says about orphaned Karen (Nikki Cheung). Visually we see this danger forewarned in the black that swarms the sides of the stage and the sinister taxidermied animals that take human form, but it never manifests in the drama itself.
There are potentially original lines: her adopted mother, Mariella (Dianne Pilkington, played like Cinderella’s cruel stepmother), suggests she is a foreigner, and her first dance has a non-western aesthetic, as if originating from the Indigenous culture of Karen’s recently dead mother. This has the bud of an idea about Karen’s cultural othering, but it is not carried through.
There is also the suggestion that her shoes give Karen a seductive power – even her adoptive father (James Doherty) is drawn to her, but this potentially subversive idea is quickly snuffed out too.
Slickly directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad, the production excels in its movement. Like the exquisite Powell and Pressburger film with the unmatchable Moira Shearer, the production stars a professional ballerina in the central role and Cheung’s dancing is the most hypnotic thing here.
Who is this show for? There are all the signs it is aspiring for crossover appeal with its darkly lit atmosphere of brooding and a very adult erection joke veiled as a magic trick. But Harris’s script is just not clever or enchanting enough for the grownups, and is like a panto in its humour. Characters are flat, there is weak doggerel and occasional spurts of half-songs that, at least, melt away quickly.
Puzzlingly, there are interludes from other fairytales: a talking mirror lifted out of Snow White and a prince with a shoe who seems to want to turn Karen into Bad Cinderella. None of it seems deeply considered.
The iconic 1948 film gave a mature twist to the story, with the creation of a controlling Svengali. Here, you wish for less obedience to the Andersen original, more inspiration from Powell and Pressburger’s darkly glittering invention.
At the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 19 January
