Edward Scissorhands started breaking hearts very early in its long journey to the stage. At first, though, they were the purely vestigial — indeed, practically notional — hearts of producers and agents, so nobody really cared. Matthew Bourne remembers that when he first suggested the idea of adapting Tim Burton’s goth-romantic film, “everyone thought it was going to be a musical”.
“At that point, even I thought it would be a musical. People were rubbing their hands together, thinking, ‘Broadway, big bucks.’ Then they realised ...” His voice drops to an Eeyore monotone. “‘Oh, it’s a ballet.’”
This was seven or eight years ago, and Bourne was hot. He still is — outside the strictly demarcated world of classical ballet, he is probably the most famous British choreographer ever, running his own company and courted by everyone from Disney to the National Theatre. Back then, though, he was about to conquer America. His revolutionary Swan Lake, with its fiercely male swans and dysfunctional royal family, was coming off an all-conquering world tour and about to take Broadway by multi-award-winning storm. Bourne was hot even by Hollywood standards.
Well, almost. He recalls a trip to Los Angeles: “My new agents were trying to impress me — ‘Who would you like to meet? Anyone you like.’” A meaner spirit might have tested them with a request for Tom Cruise or Steven Spielberg. Bourne chose Danny Elfman. “And literally the next day I was having lunch with him. Which was impressive, because he didn’t know who I was.”
There were enough powerbrokers in New York and LA who did know about Bourne, however, and were anxious to get him together with the composer who wrote the score for Burton’s 1990 film. “I’m amazed he turned up,” says Bourne. “Danny can be difficult to pin down. But he was so open. He came from the theatre originally and was intrigued by the idea of doing something again for the stage. So the next step was to meet Tim and try to persuade him.”
One of the difficulties Bourne encountered was the number of collaborators with a stake in the original. Elfman owned the score, Burton and the screenwriter, Caroline Thompson, owned the story, and 20th-Century Fox, says Bourne, with the weary shrug of someone who has spent too long reading small print, “owns the title or something”. This is why, he suggests, when Edward Scissorhands finally comes to the stage this month, it will take less time to see the show than to read the credits in the programme. “And for Danny, Tim and Caroline,” says Bourne, “it was one of their favourites. They’ve always resisted any exploitation of it because it was so personal.”
For nobody was this more true than for Burton. “He’s a lot like the character,” says Bourne, “and used to be even more so when he was younger, I suppose.” The film tells the story of a boy built by an inventor who died before finishing him, leaving blades where the hands should be. After being accidentally discovered by an Avon lady, he is eventually, albeit temporarily, accepted by a small suburban community because of his talent for topiary and hairdressing. Visually, Edward may recall a goth Freddy Krueger or a low-tech Borg, but emotionally he is a snapshot of that moment in the original Frankenstein when Boris Karloff, in all innocence, is about to terminally befriend a little girl. “It’s about Tim feeling alienated as a young man,” says Bourne. “But I think, for him, it’s more about feeling you can’t connect with anyone, because everything you touch you hurt.”
Bourne has his own memories of alienation to draw on, although he dismisses them impatiently when asked. He is quietly but quickly spoken, with the confidence you would expect of someone who, at 45, has a decade of constant mainstream success behind him. In conversation, he is friendly and open, but with a habit of leaning back slightly, like a long-sighted teacher at a lectern, when giving his opinion, and with a wryness characteristic of the outsider: someone more used to observing than joining in. Tweak the gentrified Walthamstow accent a touch, insert more pauses, and it would be easy to imagine him as Alan Bennett’s smoother, sleeker, much younger brother.
He remembers school as a place of boredom and mild intimidation. Although he “wasn’t terribly bullied”, he learnt not to look anyone in the eye. His “real” life, which he learnt to keep from his fellow pupils, revolved around the theatre — putting on private shows for his family, or taking a bus into the West End to queue for cheap seats or hunt for autographs. When he left school, he took a series of jobs on the far peripheries of show business: at the Keith Prowse ticket agency, for example, or the National Theatre bookshop.
Even after he joined the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in the early 1980s, there is a sense that he did not totally belong. Bourne’s love of a strong story, clearly told, sets him apart from the mass of contemporary British dance, just as it explains his popularity among audiences who have no patience for what he describes as “experimenting in leotards”. Bourne had no choice but to form his own company — even in the dance world, it was the only place he could feel at home. “But that’s a universal,” he insists. “Look at Billy Elliot — it’s so successful because it’s not really about dance, it’s about growing up in a place where you want to be something else or do something else, and nobody understands. Anyone who’s ever experienced teenage angst can respond to that, and the character of Edward has that same sort of universal appeal. We can make him so many things.”
Burton was won over by Bourne’s growing, financially capricious conviction that he wanted to do the show as pure dance. “He liked that,” says Bourne, “because then it became more different from the film, less exploitative. When I started speaking to Caroline Thompson, she said she and Tim had originally conceived it as a musical, and she’d written some lyrics. Having decided not to go that way once, I don’t think they’d have given me permission to do it.” After seeing a few of Bourne’s shows, including Swan Lake and his Blitz-set Cinderella, Burton told him: “I don’t understand what it is you do, but whatever it is, do it like that.”
Since then, shows and even companies have come and gone. Bourne has made a gender-reversed, garage-set version of Carmen, The Car Man. He has revived and updated old shows, including his 1992 Nutcracker, and debuted at the National Theatre with a Joseph Losey-inspired piece of dance theatre, Play Without Words. He has choreographed the movement in My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins, and spent two years developing a stage version of The Little Mermaid for Disney, before deciding that a musical in which the lead character has no legs in the first act and no voice in the second wasn’t really going to work. And through all that time, whenever anyone asked what he was doing next, he answered: “Edward Scissorhands.” “I gave up on it once or twice,” says Bourne. “I decided I couldn’t talk about it any longer, and had to get it out of my head.”
Suddenly, though, there are no more obstacles. When we meet, rehearsals are only three days old, still at what Bourne calls the “Mike Leigh stage”, when the 30 performers are sitting around describing their characters’ relationships with each other. But there have already been six weeks of workshops, and the big solos and duets are, says Bourne, “pretty well worked out”. It is typical of his nonconformist approach that he can say: “At this stage, it ’s all about structure and telling the story. The last thing you want to be thinking about is steps.”
The steps did pose special problems, though. In the first couple of workshops, Kerry Biggin and Hannah Vassallo — who share the role of Edward’s love interest, Kim, opposite Sam Archer and Richard Winsor — wore goggles, until it became clear that it was less dangerous simply to take their chances and count their eyeballs at the end. Gradually, Edward’s hands have evolved into sophisticated, spring-loaded, weight-bearing objects offering, say Archer and Biggin, minimal risk to life and limb. “But we’ve tried to find dance equivalents to all the special effects, instead of relying on trickery,” says Bourne. “So we’ve got human topiary, for instance.”
Thompson has worked closely with Bourne on the scenario. Terry Davies, who did the brilliantly atmospheric jazz-sleazy score for Play Without Words, has adapted, expanded and added to Elfman’s music. Some of the tunes, says Bourne, still feel as if they would work best in a traditional musical, but he has few regrets. “It’s a pity some people who would go to see, say, A Chorus Line will still feel a barrier against seeing this. And I haven’t ruled out directing a musical one day. But there has to be a big idea, I don’t want to rehash something just for the sake of it. I don’t know, I just feel what we’re doing here is unique.”
Edward Scissorhands is at Plymouth Theatre Royal, Nov 14-19, and Sadler’s Wells, EC1, Nov 22-Feb 5
