No tinsel but plenty of tangled woods. So much in fairytale overlaps with Shakespeare: death-defying stupors, disguises, ambiguous magicians, unparented heroines. Yet the folktale kernel is distinct: a raw picture of the unconscious, free of precise character traits. We may know what Goldilocks had for breakfast but it’s hard to imagine the sound of her voice.
Both differences and overlaps make it a marvellous idea for the RSC to stage The Red Shoes. Hans Christian Andersen’s story of a girl compelled by her magical footwear to dance continues to yield different interpretations: his fairytale about enchanted galoshes doesn’t seem to have taken off in the same way. Originally a brutal warning against vanity – the heroine gets her feet chopped off – the 1845 tale was turned by Powell and Pressburger’s haunting 1948 movie into a terrifying study of the tug in a ballet dancer between vocation and desire. I remember with jolting clarity Emma Rice’s adaptation for Kneehigh in 2000, when I sat on a bale of straw in the Lost Gardens of Heligan, watching a disembodied pair of ballet shoes pursuing the heroine, with ribbons streaming from them like blood.
