Playwright Nancy Harris told David Hennessy about her new take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, the inherent darkness of fairy tales and her love of writing about outsiders.
Dun Laoghaire playwright Nancy Harris this week brings Hans Christian Andersen’s dark fairy tale, The Red Shoes, into the 21st century in the intimate surroundings of the Swan Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company.
Directed by Kimberley Rampersad, The Red Shoes is magical but also a cautionary tale of pride and vanity.
The Red Shoes tells the story of Karen, an orphaned young woman taken in by some local do-gooders.
Dazzled by a pair of beautiful shoes, she sees the chance to do and be so much more, but soon her feet betray her, taking her to places she does not wish to go.
Nikki Cheung, whose previous credits include The Lion King on the West End, makes her RSC debut as Karen.
Nancy Harris is an award-winning writer from Dublin who lives in London.
She is returning to the RSC after The Magician’s Elephant, for which she wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics with composer Marc Teitler.
Her other plays include Somewhere Out There You (Abbey Theatre, Ireland), Two Ladies (Bridge Theatre, London), The Beacon (Druid, Galway and the Gate Theatre Dublin and now produced by Irish Rep in New York).
She is a past recipient of The Stewart Parker Award for playwriting and The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
She is also the writer and creator of the BAFTA nominated comedy drama The Dry about a recovering alcoholic who returns to her Dublin family after years away in London.
Nancy was also BAFTA nominated for her episodes of the Channel 4 series Dates and contributed scripts for Secret Diary of a Call Girl, The Good Karma Hospital and the epic miniseries Troy: Fall of a City.
We chatted to her when the play was in rehearsals.
You are in rehearsals, what is it like seeing you’re the Red Shoes come to life?
“It’s really amazing.
“It’s very exciting especially because this play has a lot of elements to it so there are bits where I’ve sort of invited the director and the cast and the designers to use their imagination in terms of how they’re going to do it, so I never really know how it’s going to look and it’s always really exciting to see those bits come to life.
“I had to create the space in the story for all that but obviously, the limits of my imagination on dance are quite high.
“My imagination is limited around all that stuff whereas Kimberly, the director, is a choreographer as well and so the things that she’s come up with are just beautiful.”
How did The Red Shoes first come to you? Is it a story that you grew up with and then wanted to present your own take on?
“Actually, no.
“The first encounter I had was the Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes.
“But the Gate in Dublin, Selina Cartmell who had been running it at the time, decided they wanted to do a version and thought I’d be good for it because I’d written a musical called Baddies which was based on the villains of fairy tales and she had really loved that.
“She also quite liked my adult work which has a dark skew and so she thought I’d be really good for this.
“I read the fairy tale and was like, ‘This is really hard because it’s not a fairy tale where everything works out okay in the end. It’s a fairy tale where the girl gets her feet chopped off’.
“Also the moral of it is that vanity is a sin and this poor orphan gets punished for wanting these shoes.
“I was like, ‘I don’t agree with the moral’.
“The moral is very harsh but I think if you’re going to adapt a fairy tale, you have to stay true to the fairy tale so I was like, ‘How can I do this? Keep every single thing that Hans Christian Andersen has put in place. Don’t let myself off the hook. Don’t try and make it nice. Don’t try and make a happy ending’.
“And, ‘Is there a way of reaching a different end while having the same end?’
“Because in the end, she dies and goes up into spirit form.
“I was like, ‘Well maybe there’s a way of doing that where she doesn’t necessarily die but it’s ambiguous and that there’s transcendence to be found in the story’.
“And I think that’s what we’ve done.
“I’ve found new ways of showing the same things that the fairy tale has but it’s a pretty faithful adaptation.
“If you wanted to read the story and then watch the play you could go, ‘All the same things are there’.
“They won’t go, ‘She changed the ending and made it happy and that’s not what happened in the version…’
“We have changed the ending but we haven’t changed the ending.
“The meaning is different, the ending is the same.”
The morals are tough. I think it has been described as, ‘Be careful what you wish for’ but it strikes me as more, ‘Do as you’re told’ in that she is punished for wearing these shoes..
“Well she’s an orphan: She’s powerless, she’s lost mother and then she sees these shoes and she just wants them.
“It’s almost like ‘you shouldn’t step above your station’ is what the story is saying.
“I didn’t like that but I was like, ‘How can I tell that story absolutely as he’s done it and arrive at a different conclusion?’
“Actually there is truth in the story itself: The powerless people get punished a lot harder than people with power for the same mistakes and that I felt was really interesting.
“I was like, ‘How can I use this story to tell that story?’”
You have just mentioned that word, power. And for you, this is a story all about power, have you then tried to give some of that power back to Karen in your adaptation?
“I have but it’s tough.
“It’s a tough version of a tough story.
“But yes, by the end she finds her feet, as it were, after she loses her feet, and that’s what I love about fairy tales.
“The point of fairy tales is that they actually are there to build resilience.
“They’re there to teach us how to get out of a dark forest, how to escape a bad wolf but they’re for everyone and actually, adults probably get more out of fairy tales than children in many ways because you recognise what they’re offering us is a path through so if you change too much of them, you negate the power of them.
“Because the truth is we are all going, to some extent, metaphorically have our feet cut off at different times: We’ll lose jobs. We lose people we love. Tough things happen, and can you survive them?
“And I think this version is saying, ‘You can survive them. You can be better for them. It doesn’t mean you won’t be wounded but your wound will become your strength’.”
People often forget the darkness in fairy tales.
In the Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off their toes to try to fit into the glass slipper.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the title character has her tongue cut out by the witch, and, as you say, in The Red Shoes, Karen has her feet cut off.
“They’re very brutal at times.
“Hansel and Gretel is such a terrifying story but it’s like, ‘Just because somebody’s got a lovely gingerbread house full of sweets, don’t just trust them. Don’t fall for false facades’.
“And it’s keeping us aware, ‘Be aware of the situation you’re in’.
“And those are good lessons for children.
“It is dark but it’s also funny.
“It’s very funny.
“She’s adopted into this family of people who’ve adopted an orphan because they want to get onto a board of Save the orphans Foundation.
“She’s like a trophy for them, like somebody getting a dog for Christmas.
“They have no ability to look after this orphan.”
You were at the RSC in 2021. You were also then working on the show, The Dry. What are your memories of what must have been a crazy time with COVID and all on top it?
“My memories of that time were pretty crazy.
“I was here when The Dry was shooting so I was getting rushes from the shoot as we were putting the show on in the RST.
“My memory of that time was, it was chaos but I remember being so pleased to be back in a theatre with people.
“That time there was a real sense that theatre, and I think it’s true, was the victim of COVID.
“A family show, to me, is not just children, it’s older people, teenagers, parents, the show has to work for every level and every age and at that time, it was a real risk for grandparents to accompany people so that was really sad.
“Now I’m really happy that everybody can come and we don’t have that worry.”
It’s also a crazy time at the moment for you. Isn’t your play The Beacon on Broadway at the moment?
“It’s off Broadway in the Irish Rep which is a beautiful theatre in Chelsea, New York.
“They’ve done a really lovely production of it directed by a young Irish director called Marc Atkinson Borrell.
“And Kate Mulgrew (Orange is the new Black) is the lead in it.
“She’s a phenomenal actress and to have someone like that willing to do a play off Broadway because she believes in the play and she believes in new writing and she felt it was important, that was amazing to me.”
The Beacon is about someone living in a small community suspected of doing something awful.
You are interested in characters like that, who have such a legend or story attached to them and yet they live in a community, you see them doing everyday things..
“If you get out of the cities (in Ireland), you can imagine why people believe in fairies and believed in mythologies, because it feels wild.
“I feel there’s that heightened quality to Irish folklore that we all sort of grow up with, whether consciously or unconsciously, that gives us a love of slightly heightened stories.
“I think they sit very well with the Irish psyche and the Irish psyche is also quite dark.
“I found it very funny with The Dry that over here (UK) some of the reviewers said, ‘They’re such an awful family. They’re so mean to her’.
“And no one in Ireland said that.
“Everyone was like, ‘That’s just families’.
“It doesn’t mean they don’t love her.
“And I think everyone in Ireland understood that they did love her but that she was a pain to them.
“It was very interesting to me how that was just not at all across the conversation in Ireland, nobody felt that.
“I do think we have a dark humour and a dark sensibility.
“What I’ve tried to do also in The Red Shoes is to offer magic and excitement and mythology and darkness but not so much darkness that you get swallowed, it should be fun.”
Is it characters that are outsiders that interest you? Is that what links things like The Red Shoes, The Dry and The Beacon?
“It is, yeah.
“I think that is a really good point.
“I think the thing that does link everything I have done is there’s one character who is outside, who isn’t believed or isn’t accepted.
“The Dry is about an alcoholic who basically isn’t being taken very seriously by her own family.
“And families: The Red Shoes is about somebody desperate to have a family, desperate to belong but also who wants a pair of red shoes.
“It’s such a simple desire and the punishment doesn’t meet the crime.
“I think families and the challenge of families and being outside, being the black sheep, those are stories I’m really drawn to. Always have been.
“And trying to be good.
“The interesting thing about The Red Shoes is Karen is desperately trying to be good.
“She doesn’t want this adoptive family to not want her.
“And why do we expect, particularly women, to be good?
“I think it’s buried in the story, this idea of behaving and being good.
“I also felt that was something interesting to me because I recognise that in society, that there’s much more expectation on women to be good.
“In The Red Shoes, this young girl isn’t good. She’s not perfect but it’s not because she’s a bad person, she just chooses something that seems beautiful to her.
“Opposite to that, The Beacon is about somebody who actually refuses to be good and is that transgressive character.
“But the idea of someone who’s refusing to be good and someone who has to be good are kind of in conversation in my work, I think.”
The thing about Karen is her adoptive parents want her to be seen and not heard. The problem with that is we want children to speak up if something is wrong..
“Exactly, and we need them to speak up and take themselves seriously.
“But my generation were still told, ‘Just be quiet and behave’.
“And I think girls particularly but often children who are a bit different or don’t fit into the school system get punished for it.
“I think all of those things are really important, and are in fairy tales, but particularly this fairy tale. Actually something that Kimberly, the director, said on the first day that she loved about this story is you have a lead character that that isn’t only virtuous, you have a flawed lead character, and we’re all flawed, and so that’s always interesting to see.”
Nancy studied for a BA in Drama Studies and Classical Civilisation at Trinity College Dublin.
Although she was always compulsively writing as a child, it was only at university that she realised writing was for her.
“I hadn’t wanted to become a writer. I had wanted to be a director or an actor.
“I turned out to be not good at either of those things.
“I was really very lost in my final year and I ended up taking a playwriting module and I wrote this one act play.
“My professor was completely shocked.
“He was like, ‘Where did this come from?’
“He was like, ‘I have no notes. I think you shouldn’t change anything’.
“I didn’t know how I’d done it so I spent a year working in a bridal shop in Dublin and writing.
“Then I applied to Birmingham which is very near here.
“Stratford means a huge amount to me because I became a playwright here under David Edgar. It was the only course in England that you could do in playwriting.
“I did that and that was the beginning of my playwriting career.
“But if I hadn’t come to Birmingham, I don’t think I’d be a playwright.
“I love Birmingham, it’s one of my favourite places.
“It was where I found my voice as a playwright and it was where I really started to take myself seriously and take the work seriously.
“It was very gratifying to be taught by people that were doing it in the real world and going to the Birmingham Rep, coming to the RSC, those things.
“And then I moved from there to London and that was a bit of a culture shock because Birmingham had been so friendly and warm and London was tough. People would step over you in the street.
“Now London I do love but I’ve been there 15 or so years.”
Back to The Red Shoes and fairy tales, do you feel there is a renewed interest in these stories in recent years with many new takes on old classics?
“Fairy tales never go away.
“They’re very rich, they give us so much and they tell us so much about ourselves.
“That’s what we found with Baddies when we did it, we found that actually adults got a huge amount out of it.
“I think the same will happen with The Red Shoes.
“You sort of go, ‘Oh, that could be my life now’.
“I think there’s always going to be an appetite for fairy tales.”
Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, in a new version by Nancy Harris, plays at Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Thursday 7 November – Sunday 19 January.
For more information and to book, click here.
