Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands
New Adventures Dance Theatre Company Hit back at Sadler's Wells
Dec 2, 2008
Matthew Bourne, artistic director of New Adventures Dance Theatre Company, is known for his ground-breaking shows in the world of interpretive dance, be it his sexy '60s romp Play Without Words, the dancing male swan ensemble in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, or his timely adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. After a world tour through the US and Australia, Edward Scissorhands is returning to its home stage at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre for those who want to see it again just in time for the holidays.
It seems only natural that Bourne, with his unconventional style and razor-sharp vision, could successfully adapt and enrich Tim Burton's story, creating another "play without words", including a would-be-lovers' romantic pas-de-deux sans scissors.
The story of Edward Scissorhands is a cautionary tale.
Once upon a time, there was a man with a sugar-cookie heart, a wonderfully strange and wide-eyed creature who lived alone in a gothic, gloomy castle at the end of candy-coloured suburbia on top of a hill. Then one day, Avon representative Peg Boggs came to call upon him, and everything in Edward’s innocent isolated world instantly transformed into a pastel sojourn of discovery, acceptance, betrayal, love, and the ultimate heartbreak.
Edward Scissorhands, director Tim Burton’s timeless father-and-son Frankenstein-cum-Pinocchio story about the outcast in all of us, is now a Christmas movie tradition. The film marked horror master Vincent Price’s last screen role as the kindly Inventor who delights in reading his son Edward the rules of dining etiquette and poetry while teaching him how to smile.
Johnny Depp created one of cinema’s most memorable roles as Edward the Inventor’s gentle “unfinished” man-child with scissors for hands who uses his unique gift meaning to create beauty, only to have it turn against him. As his new surburban life is cut to shreds by gossip and lies, he loses his cookie heart to Peg's daughter Kim, their “unfinished” love joining the romantic annals of Wuthering Heights' Catherine and Heathcliff, or Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
In 2005, multi award-winning British choreographer Matthew Bourne took Edward Scissorhands adapting into dance theatre with the blessing of Tim Burton, music score composer Danny Elfman, and screenwriter Caroline Thompson.
Elfman’s breath-taking score is a character in itself, from the fantasy waltz where Kim Boggs pirhouettes in the flying ice flakes as Edward lovingly sculpts her angelic ice image, to the scheming Hope Springs cougar Joyce Monroe, who slithers half naked around the beauty salon literally wanting to get her own scissor-like claws into Edward.
The juxtaposition of visual splendour in Edward Scissorhands lends itself beautifully to movement and interpretation of ballet theatre from the gothic Chaplin / Pierrot essence of Edward to the bouffant ladies in Peg Bogg’s American everyday small-minded suburbia.
Like the Inventor and his Scissorhanded son, kindred outsiders Tim Burton and Matthew Bourne have created something strange, magical and everlasting.
Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands continues to thrill audiences around the world, the perfect Christmas show for the whole family about an "unfinished" man who literally cannot touch anyone but continues to touch our hearts forever.
Edward Scissorhands opens Dec 2 at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre and continues to January 18, 2009.
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