Chilling: Arthur Pita’s The Little Match Girl at Sadler’s Wells reviewed

Did your feet twitch? That’s the test of The Red Shoes. Did your toes point? Your ankles flex? Your arches ache to dance all night? I defy you to watch Powell and Pressburger’s film of The Red Shoes (1948), inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen story, and not feel the sinister magic right down to your last metatarsal.

First staged in 2016, Matthew Bourne’s riff on The Red Shoes is a show about show business. In spirit it is closer to Singin’ in the Rain than the weird Technicolor glamour of Powell and Pressburger. This is a fairy tale about stage flats and spotlights, cigarettes and fur coats, about ballet masters, wardrobe mistresses, sheet music, leotards, bouquets and the barre. Ashley Shaw dances Victoria Page, styled very much after Moira Shearer with red waves to match her slippers. She dances the early scenes beautifully. Her poise, brightness and new-girlishness are just right. She is less convincing as the dancer willing to die for her art. Shaw is pleasing, but not prima.

Adam Cooper, who created the part of the Swan/Stranger in Bourne’s Swan Lake, is stalking and saturnine as the Diaghilev-like impresario Boris Lermontov, while Dominic North is regrettably spoddy as the struggling composer Julian Craster. When Craster waves his baton, it is less Sir Simon Rattle, more Harry Potter. Bourne’s choreography is always inventive, if not always comfortable. At times, Shaw and North’s pas de deux looks like couple’s yoga.

But you’re there for the spectacle: the proscenium arch, the red velvet curtains, the revolving set that reels you from backstage to front of house, rehearsal room to wings. The show opens with a parody ballet of the plodding old guard: mothballed melodrama, Winterhalter frocks, sighs you can hear from the gods.