The Bourne identity

From a film about ballet to a ballet about film. In reworking the 1948 Powell and Pressburger classic The Red Shoes for his latest show, Matthew Bourne pays homage to far more than the unforgettable story of a budding ballerina and the bloody toll of her choice between love and career. With the glee of George Lucas recreating second world war dogfights in space, Bourne, a cinéphile since childhood, stuffs his Red Shoes with images from Hollywood’s Golden Age: a French Riviera coast here, a battered old piano there, fur coats and train whistles and sequin-and-feather tap-dancers.

The problem with this love letter to cinema is that it blunts the edge of the story’s cruelty towards Victoria Page, the wearer of the titular shoes. For all the charm of Ashley Shaw (who does a remarkable approximation of Moira Shearer’s quicksilver musicality) and the clever stagecraft that suggests the fatal locomotive, her death on stage doesn’t have quite the same bite as it does in the film.