Rewriting The Red Shoes (Step 1)

“I would like to see, Mr Craster, what you can do in the way of a little rewriting,” the ballet impresario Boris Lermontov tells the young composer in The Red Shoes. “Oh, you can take your time. There’s no hurry!”

Emeric Pressburger, who wrote the screenplay for The Red Shoes, had a theory that scripts have to be left to mature. He believed that if you work an idea too hard, you risk losing creative energy. “But you keep it in a drawer for six months – better a year – and it collects energy once more.” He wrote these words in 1978, after he had been asked to introduce a screening of an earlier film that he had written, A Canterbury Tale. For more than thirty years, it had been dismissed as a disappointing flop, but now it was being appreciated at last, and he wanted to explain why.

A Canterbury Tale itself explains well Pressburger’s understanding of the creative potential of allowing time to pass. In his workshop, surrounded by the Kent countryside, a wheelwright discusses the challenges of looking after wood. “You can’t hurry an elm,” he observes. It has to be seasoned. Only capitalists, who can’t bear to see their money lie idle, would be so foolish as to use the timber before it was ready.

The fact that The Red Shoes had been left in a drawer for several years gave it a patina that inspired Pressburger when he returned to the project. I think, too, it explains the strange sense of déjà vu that the composer Julian Craster – to a degree, Pressburger’s alter ego – seems to feel when Lermontov presses on to him the assignment. It is as if he is about to return to a story he already knows.

A good fairytale reaches out into our own world, and then reflects it back to us. I knew that the man who played Boris Lermontov had lived in the same road as me. I would sometimes visit his grave when I was seeing a film at the Everyman Cinema. His address was no. 69 Frognal, on the corner with Redington Road – only a short walk from the house of Emeric Pressburger.

Hampstead, in North London, where I had grown up in the 1970s – at no. 47 Frognal – was a perfect place for déjà vu. I was just getting to know the strange, mesmerizing films of Powell & Pressburger and – although I had no idea of it back then – the ballerina who gave some of the earliest energy to The Red Shoes lived only a little further up the road from Anton Walbrook, at no. 108.

She and I belonged to just-overlapping generations. I would have unwittingly passed her house whenever I walked up Frognal to Whitestone Pond to catch the 210 bus to school. The blue plaque in her memory was put up several years after she had died and I had left Hampstead.

At this point, if this blog were a film, there would be a long, Colonel Blimp-style flashback – not just forty years ago, but more than a hundred. It is springtime in Monte Carlo, 1911. Tamara Karsavina is appearing in the very first performance of a new Ballets Russes production.

She is the Young Girl in Le Spectre de la Rose. Returning tired but excited from her first ball, she sits down in an armchair. As she falls asleep, she lets slip to the ground the rose she has worn to the dance. The discarded flower then takes life again in the form of a young, androgynous Vaslav Nijinsky, only 22 years old, at the height of his extraordinary power and elegance, who then coaxes the Young Girl awake, inspiring her to dance again.

The Ballets Russes was the sensation of its time. Founded only three years before by the Russian impresario Sergey Diaghilev, it was already laying down the stories that The Red Shoes would later plunder.

“I think that the real reason why The Red Shoes was such a success,” commented Pressburger’s collaborator Michael Powell, “was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and die for art.” In Le Spectre de la Rose, Nijinsky had offered a bewitching, irresistible model for such self-destructive dedication. The ballet ends with him famously leaping out of a window. It was his nature always to push beyond the limits.

As far as his employer and lover Diaghilev was concerned, Nijinsky’s greatest trangression was to marry the Hungarian aristocrat Romola de Pulszky during a Ballets Russes tour of South America in 1913, when foolish Diaghilev had decided not to make the trip. Romola recalled Diaghilev’s hostile response after the couple had returned to Europe. “A telegram was handed to Vaslav. As he read it, he gazed for a long time, and seemed not to comprehend it. After a long while, he gave it to me. It was in French, and ran as follows: “Your services with the Russian Ballet are no more required, don't join us. Sergey de Diaghilev.” I was petrified. Vaslav, the glory, the greatest dancer, the pillar of the Ballet, outcast, dismissed, as a servant, from the creation of art for which he was responsible, because of his marriage. This was Diaghilev’s revenge.”

Diaghilev’s revenge was a powerful catalyst in the fermentation of accumulating story ideas that would eventually become the Red Shoes film. His death in 1929 meant that the early 1930s were an obvious time to take stock of what the Ballets Russes had achieved. In 1930, Tamara Karsavina published her memoir, Theatre Street. Then, three years later, in November 1933, Romola Nijinsky brought out a biography of her husband.

“There is a great tragedy in this book,” wrote the critic James Agate in the Daily Express. He suggested that it was Nijinsky’s conflicted attitude towards his art that drove him insane. He had told Romola that he wanted to give up dancing and return to Russia to live on a farm. She replied that she hadn’t won him away from Diaghilev to marry a farmer. “If you go, you go alone,” she told him. “I can’t become a peasant. Even if I love you, I will divorce you and marry some manufacturer.”

In June 1934, the ballet star Anton Dolin produced and appeared in the play Precipice at the Savoy Theatre in London. Written by the playwright Frances Gregory, it drew on Dolin’s own memories of dancing with the Ballets Russes. Anticipating The Red Shoes, it featured a show within a show – a ballet called “La mort”, which the central character, brilliant dancer Michael Michaeloff, is forbidden by Russian impresario Boris Hohlakov to perform in public.

Offering a dramatisation of the real-life conflict between Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the play ends with Michael, who has finally gone mad, leaping – Nijinsky-like – out of the window of a sixth-floor Paris apartment during a private performance of the forbidden ballet. When fifteen years later Vicky Page leapt to her death from the terrace outside the Monte Carlo opera house in the finale of The Red Shoes film, it was a continuation of the same idea. The ballet “La Mort”, within Precipice, anticipated the death-bringing Ballet of The Red Shoes.

By the time Precipice opened in early June 1934, Romola Nijinsky’s book had become an international bestseller. The film mogul Alexander Korda announced his intention that same month to make a film version of the book that would feature Charles Laughton as Diaghilev and Paul Muni as Nijinsky. But at the same time he gave the New York theatre producer Sam H. Harris an option to dramatize the story for the stage. The young British playwright Keith Winter, a lover of Noël Coward, who had made a successful Broadway début with his play The Shining Hour, was invited in September 1934 to travel to New York to work on the adaptation. No performed play emerged out of this initiative, but it still resulted in material that Winter was able to put away in his drawer for later . . .

Step 2...