What happens in The Red Shoes
The Red Shoes is a dance theatre adaptation of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 film, itself drawn from Hans Christian Andersen's 1845 fairy tale. The story follows Victoria Page, a young ballerina, as she is torn between the two men whose visions of her future cannot coexist: the impresario Boris Lermontov, who sees in her the company's next great star, and the composer Julian Craster, who loves her as a woman first and a dancer second.
Act I — The Lermontov Company
The act opens in post-war London. Victoria Page is a young dancer trying to break into the Ballet Lermontov, an internationally celebrated company led by the brilliant, autocratic Boris Lermontov. The young composer Julian Craster is similarly trying to find a place in Lermontov's circle. Both succeed: Victoria joins as a dancer, Julian as an arranger, and Lermontov chooses Victoria as the next prima ballerina. The Act closes with Victoria dancing the title role in a new ballet commissioned for her — The Red Shoes — choreographed by Lermontov, scored by Julian.
The ballet-within-a-ballet
The Red Shoes sequence is the production's centrepiece: a 15-minute danced version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, in which a girl puts on a pair of enchanted red shoes that compel her to dance forever, unable to stop. Bourne's choreography sets it inside the Lermontov ballet stage, with the Hans Christian Andersen tale danced within the larger production. It is one of the most accomplished extended dance passages in the New Adventures repertoire.
Act II — Love and consequence
Victoria and Julian fall in love. Lermontov, who runs his company on the principle that a ballerina cannot serve two masters, fires Julian. Victoria leaves with him, returning to London where she scrapes a living dancing in the music halls — Bourne's choreography for these sequences is some of the production's bleakest and most theatrically inventive. When Lermontov offers Victoria the chance to dance The Red Shoes again, she is forced to choose. The choice does not end well. The production's final sequence draws directly on the iconography of the 1948 film.
The score
Terry Davies's orchestration draws on Bernard Herrmann's wider catalogue rather than just the 1948 film score — including his work on Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Psycho, and his radio collaborations with Orson Welles at CBS and RKO. The broader source material allows the production to build a much wider emotional palette than the original film, with the music sometimes referencing Herrmann's most iconic later film work to deliberate effect.
How The Red Shoes got made
Matthew Bourne and the Powell/Pressburger ambition
Matthew Bourne first encountered Powell and Pressburger's 1948 film as a young dance student and considered it, on first viewing, the ideal source material for a dance theatre adaptation. The project sat in development for more than two decades — through Bourne's success with Swan Lake (1995), Cinderella, The Car Man, Edward Scissorhands and Sleeping Beauty — before finally being staged in 2016. By the time the production opened it was both a personal love letter from Bourne and a fully matured piece of company work.
The 2016 premiere
The Red Shoes premiered at Theatre Royal Plymouth in November 2016 and transferred to Sadler's Wells in London the following month for the company's Christmas season. It was a sell-out before it opened. Reviews on opening were uniformly strong, and at the 2017 Olivier Awards it won Best Entertainment and Best Theatre Choreographer. International success followed — including a Los Angeles run that picked up further awards — and the production returned for a national tour in 2019.
The 2020 tour and the pandemic
A 2020 tour was cut short by the covid pandemic, leaving large parts of the UK audience without the production they had bought tickets for. Bourne's statement on the 2025/26 revival explicitly addressed this: the new tour was, in part, a chance to reach the audiences the company had been forced to disappoint five years earlier.
The 10th-anniversary revival
The 2025/26 revival opened at Theatre Royal Plymouth on 17 November 2025, then transferred to the Lowry Salford and on to Sadler's Wells for the Christmas season from 2 December 2025 to 18 January 2026 — New Adventures' 23rd consecutive Christmas residency at the venue. Eleven members of the original 2016 cast returned for the revival, with Ashley Shaw, Cordelia Braithwaite, Hannah Kremer and Holly Saw alternating as Victoria Page. The tour continues throughout 2026 to 13 venues across the UK.
About New Adventures
New Adventures is the dance company founded by Matthew Bourne — one of the most successful and internationally recognised British dance companies. The company's signature productions include Swan Lake, The Car Man, Edward Scissorhands, Nutcracker!, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and The Red Shoes. New Adventures has had a 23-year continuous Christmas residency at Sadler's Wells, making it one of the longest-running annual partnerships in British dance.
The source material
The Powell and Pressburger 1948 film is widely regarded as one of the greatest British films ever made and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two (Best Score and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration). It starred Moira Shearer (in her film debut) as Victoria Page, Anton Walbrook as Boris Lermontov, and Marius Goring as Julian Craster. The Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale on which it is loosely based is one of Andersen's darkest stories — a cautionary tale about vanity in which the girl who covets the red shoes cannot stop dancing once she puts them on.
