In exchange for legs, every step The Little Mermaid takes on land is agonising, like walking on broken glass. Too terrified to disappoint her father through failing to sell enough matchsticks, The Little Match Girl freezes to death in an alley. And in The Red Shoes, a girl must dance to her death for deigning to cherish the last gift bestowed by her late mother.
What, exactly, is revered fairytale-spinner Hans Christian Andersen’s beef with young women and their humble desire to merely exist in happiness and safety?
Yeah, what's this guy's damage?
An excellent question that cabaret goddess and all-round chimerical queen Meow Meow has pondered across a triptych of tantalising works. Each unpicks the thorny crown the dubious Dane imposed on the heart of his not-very-Disney fantasies.
Our voyage began with absurdly comic diva Meow Meow’s 2011 spin on The Little Match Girl. Continuing five years later with The Little Mermaid, it’s been a long road to reach the crowning glory, but by golly was it worth the inordinate, near-decade-long wait.
What’s the gist and who’s involved in Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes?
Directed by Kate Champion, whose work lives up to that sterling surname, Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes opens on a great big pile of trash. Heaped on the left-hand side of the Merlyn stage by whip-smart set and costume designer Dann Barber, the detritus of capitalism’s ghosts includes boxy TVs, old speakers, an abandoned fridge and a rubbery tyre, all ashen as if this is a long-spent pyre.
This bonfire of the inanities recalls the dirt pile of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Beyond, a vast faded curtain hangs along the rear, bearing the Danish motto “Ei blot til lyst,” meaning “Not just for pleasure,” a sly nod towards young girls and the women they hopefully become, in an epidemic of violence, who aren’t merely toys for the boys.
That shroud tatters away to nothing in the right-hand corner, where we first spy our archangel of the absurd, Meow Meow. Or at least her stockinged legs, protruding from the wings. It seems our Karen – the girl of the story, though she is about to complain to the manager – is already all danced out.
After failing to meet lighting designer Rachel Burke’s hilariously jittering spotlight in desperate search of our star, Meow Meow’s dragged onstage, face down, in indignity by our chorus: musicians Dan Witton, Mark Jones and musical director Jethro Woodward.
They slowly coax Meow Meow, in a tattered corset, tutu and bewigged crown, into motion. She’s played like a puppet or wind-up ballerina, until the full majesty of her unbridled theatrical might returns. As she lithely dances atop the musician’s pianos, themselves a-whirl on casters, we’re instantly bound up in this can-can of derring-do.
What about those shoes?
We’re getting to that, via the apocalyptic poetry of Radiohead. Amongst a beauteous bevy of brilliant new songs and classics, Meow Meow sings “A heart that’s full up like a landfill, a job that slowly kills you, bruises that won’t heal.”
All the irony of 'No Surprises' and its final bellyaches is summoned forth like sturm und drang, a fading musing on what it takes to be an artist of Meow Meow’s calibre in a cursed timeline of populist fascism and climate collapse.
And so Karen, like any number of us sticking a band-aid on existential despair, opens that fridge to upend a bounty of late-night Amazon purchases from which she’ll conjure new outfits, including one wine-hued cowboy boot. A Promethean beast, all fleshy parts, will also clamber from this once-icy pit in the shape of operatic tenor Kanen Breen.
Looking uncanny like Jacob Elordi’s tragic creature from Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, he’s a chameleonic figure who will also assume the horned form of a bacchanalian fawn and Andersen, full of himself.
A remarkably unfurling show, Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is a wild ride that inhabits the feral spirit of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 musical and a litany of touchstones from Le Folie Bergère to the Weimar Republic’s doom, as Meow Meow’s artfully slipping feather headdress claims joint top billing.
With an unrivalled agility for physical comedy, Meow Meow dances on and on, donning mismatching red heel, singular, and pointe shoe to limber deceptively ungainly through this dystopian dream. Of a cruelly cursed young woman’s desire for connection beyond the vale and a woman’s head held high in the face of decay.
She’ll hold tight against the fading light and the powers and politics that put the boot on the neck of the poor, holing them down where it’s deemed they belong. Meow Meow muses on the cost of art and the price of performance as the world, all our stage, burns and floods because of oil money and the gloopy bones of dinosaur life, worth more than our bodies and souls.
Who will love Meow Meow's The Red Shoes?
Anyone alive who can stumble into the Malthouse. A true piece of theatrical magic, Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes throws off the curse of misogyny while dancing to Debussy and Doris Fisher. Run, don’t walk, to ensure tickets to this sublime shoe-fits and starts of something far more powerful than ill-fated destiny. Take that, handsy Andersen.
Meow Meow's The Red Shoes is currently showing at the Malthouse Theatre until December 6. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
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