- Adapted from Anderson by Emma Rice
- Designed by Bill Mitchell
- Directed by Emma Rice
- Music by Stu Barker
- Words by Anna Marie Murphy
- Outdoor and indoor touring, small and large-scale venues
At the time, I was really inspired by Bruno Bettelheim’s book, The Uses of Enchantment (1976). He was a Holocaust survivor, and he had a thesis - which has now been discredited - that fairy stories are therapeutic: we tell them, and they come to us at times when we need them. I was interested in the trauma that Bruno Bettelheim had felt in the camps, and the thought that stories might actually be plugging into something really dark. I felt that The Red Shoes was really dark, and my process and my mind was much less formed than it is now, but in many ways, it was all the richer for it. But I knew that I wanted all the storytellers to have shaved heads, and I knew that I wanted them in underwear, and I knew that I wanted them in clogs, and I knew that I wanted my storyteller to be this amazing drag queen, Lady Lydia…. and that underneath she was the same: that the wig would come off and there'd be a shaved head underneath.
This show was created in the early days of Emma and Stu Barker’s working relationship and was mainly soundtracked: Wagner, Offenbach, Jurassic Five etc. The production was managed by the uber-efficient Alex Wardle at the start of his five-year stay with Kneehigh. It was an extraordinary, brave and distinctive show which was coolly reviewed by Kneehigh faithful, but subsequently really took off and heralded the brilliant new era of Emma Rice’s directing.
The chorus in The Red Shoes were a chorus who’d seen things we should never have seen and done things we should never have done. We mingled with the audience. Before we started, we were barefoot, and we were just in underwear, and the first thing that we did when we went on stage was to very carefully wash and dry our feet.
