Snip!

"Mother and I went to the ballet on Thursday evening."

Now THAT is a pretentious sentence! I'd never been to the ballet before. The prospect of men in tights leaping and bounding around a stage enacting incomprehensible plots is generally far far too terrifying to contemplate inflicting upon oneself*. Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands, however, appeared to pose a gentle, understandable and practically tights free introduction to the genre. The character of Edward Scissorhands was of course originally portrayed by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's 1990 film of the same name which told the story of the inventor's misfit unfinished creation with shears of metal for hands that was taken in by a friendly Avon lady and what happened thereafter. Matthew Bourne's stage interpretation is vastly different to the film while still managing to maintain the 'guts' of the story, so to speak, with probably only one or two scenes from the movie being interpreted faithfully into the ballet. Ultimately though, it is the same story. Since I know absolutely nothing about dance, I can't actually comment on the quality of that aspect of the performance, except to say that in my extremely underqualified opinion it was fantastic. Costumes and sets were also fantastic. I love seeing things staged on a 'grand scale' with elaborate sets. Minimalism has it's appeals as well, but seeing the stage change in the space of a second from an inventor's castle to a suburban street is always going to hold more 'Wow!' factor for me than 'See this grey wall? Well at the moment you'll just have to imagine that it's a balcony which should just be obvious to you because there's a woman leaning over the top of it, and a bit later you can imagine it being the inside wall of a house and maybe after that if you're lucky you can envisage it being the OUTSIDE wall of a house!'
So yes, overall Edward Scissorhands gets a great big two-pointy-shears-of-metal up from me!


*My grade 9 drama teacher was widely known to have been a ballet dancer in his younger, hipper years which has possibly led to my being mentally scarred for life by involuntarily having to imagine him wearing a leotard every time the word 'ballet' is mentioned. Lets just say that one can only assume that he was in better shape when he was younger. Much better shape.

My apologies for not being bothered to find any pictures.