One of the great home-grown success stories in recent memory is playwright’s Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith’s Dancing Shoes, a joyful and deeply moving story about connection, recovery and the courage to let yourself be seen. Donny’s life has been shaped by addiction and isolation, but an unexpected friendship with Jay and Craig begins to change everything. When videos of Donny’s private dancing routines suddenly go viral, newfound attention threatens the bond they have built.
After its original run at Play, Pie and a Pint, in went onto be the coveted Christmas show at the Traverse Theatre last year. After a community tour, it is now in London at the Young Vic, I spoke to Stephen ahead of the show.
How does it feel to bring dancing shoes to a London audience?
Very exciting! It’s the first time one of our shows has been outside of Scotland. All the usual nerves are there, that nobody will be there, or that it is ‘too Scottish’ to click with audiences across the border, but then I remind myself that dancing to Scooter is universal.
Being part of Shedinburgh has been great. So much of the best stuff I saw over the Fringe was at their venue, and you hope that being part of such a quality, curated line-up gives people a bit of confidence in the show, and that punters will take a chance on coming along.
It’s mostly a feeling of pride. The actors are brilliant, and the work that the director and the whole creative team have done with it has taken it way beyond what we could have imagined when we first wrote it.
Dancing Shoes is such a personal story for me, and I’m still thrilled and surprised that we have got to do this show so many times.
Do you feel stories about recovery are still the exception?
I think that good stories about recovery are. It’s a tricky thing to get right. Recovery in itself can be quite anti-dramatic. It can be a time of great reflection, and the changes made can be quite subtle.
There is also a tendency in recovery plays to sit in the past, where the addiction was, which is where you get the trauma narratives that present recovery as a journey where a person does ‘bad thing’, then gets catharsis by doing a ‘good thing’. Bad recovery stories can reflect the idea that addiction is an individual moral failing, and that recovery is a personal victory.
In Dancing Shoes, for Donny, our main character, addiction and loneliness are so intertwined that they have become the same thing. He has lived alone with his mum his whole life. He’s never had a friend, never been in love, and has never left his childhood home to forge a life for himself. He drinks to accept the unacceptable: the fact that he has never allowed himself to live fully. Recovery is presented as him attempting to engage with community and friendship for the first time.
Plays about male vulnerability seem common in our current Scottish landscape, yet dancing shoes has such originality – how did you approach that in the writing?
With Dancing Shoes, it all felt very organic. The set-up that we initially had was that three men in recovery had been invited by Play, Pie and a Pint to ‘tell their story’. Immediately, we knew that all three of the men would have a different version of what the story was, and that they would all be trying to tell their own personal version.
They would also be aware of the type of story that they were expected to tell, one of great trauma and contrition for the mistakes they had made in the past. So you have three men who disagree on the truth and are constantly worried about what the audience thinks of them. The set-up is one of great vulnerability, and the audience feels that instinctively.
Instead of showing vulnerability, we tried to show people hiding it. We also knew that we wanted the play to end with the men dancing, which is inherently a vulnerable act.
Do you still find something different in the play each time you see it?
Absolutely! We’ve been so lucky with the creative team that has been involved with this show across all its different iterations. We often describe our storytelling style as throwing a bowling ball down a hill and chasing after it telling jokes, and everybody involved has given the play so much more nuance, emotion and humour than we ever could have hoped for.
The actors constantly surprise me, and I’m always noticing new stuff, whether it’s something in the direction, the choreography, or something an actor brings to a moment. It’s always different, and that’s the beautiful thing about theatre. We can’t wait to see it at the Young Vic next week.
Dancing Shoes is on at the Young Vic Theatre, London on Weds 30th September
