Christopher Walker reviews Edward Scissorhands

Every Christmas season, dance genius Matthew Bourne, treats us to a new spectacular production at Sadler’s Wells.

This year we have Edward Scissorhands. His unusual piece based on the 1990 movie starring Johnny Depp.

The plot is slightly changed from the movie, but at heart is just as daft. It relies on more than its fair share of improbable occurrences.

A young boy Edward is born with scissors for hands.

He is struck by lightning, and years later his inventive father decides to bring him back to life as he would have been.

He creates a tailor’s dummy complete with scissor hands and then himself dies when a bunch of Halloween ‘trick or treaters’ break into his laboratory and give him a heart attack.

Bourne’s Christmas pieces always have a dark side, last year we had a Christmas vampire.

Orphaned Edward ends up scavenging for food in dustbins, before he is taken in by Peg Boggs and starts to live an every day American suburban life.

He falls for a girl, is discovered as a hair cutting genius – those hands you see – and ends up in a high school brawl with his jock rival Jim.

All good clean superficial nonsense.

The design is quite fabulous for this show, thanks as ever to Matthew’s main collaborator Lez Brotherston.

Edward’s hands are really quite something, and the suburban American dream is well captured by Lez’s set, including its endless, tedious, symmetry.

Edward’s salon where he creates the most extraordinary looks, is also cleverly portrayed.

Liam Mower is a powerful dancer playing Edward who makes everything seem quite effortless.

Though that power, and the bodysuit Lez gives him, mean that he never quite seems vulnerable in the way Johnny Depp did in the original.

Kerry Biggin dances Peg Boggs and Katrina Lyndon her daughter Kim. Ben Brown is particularly memorable as Jim Upton, Edward’s rival for Kim’s hand.

Somehow there is less interesting choreography than in Matthew’s other pieces.

At the end of the day those hands really do get in the way of everything, including the dancing.

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