"The Red Shoes". Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

There are some plays where you can’t help feeling that the majority of the audience is missing the point, and this is one of them.

It’s not their fault. The Royal Shakespeare Company is marketing The Red Shoes as a Christmas treat for all the family. There were under-10s in the auditorium of the Swan Theatre this evening, and they were watching something that might best be described as a fairytale staged by Angela Carter in partnership with Tim Burton. There were boiled-sweet-chomping, red-faced couples laughing with uproarious determination every time the psychopathic Clive swung his axe at a cat. There was even one man behind me who, in what has to rank as the evening’s most disturbing moment, responded to the sight of the heroine Karen being viciously slapped across the face by shouting out, ‘Do it again!’

Meanwhile, the more sensitive members of the audience weren’t entirely sure how to react to what we were watching. This adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s phenomenally disturbing fairy-cum-morality-cum-body-horror-tale has a clear, unique vision that does not settle comfortably into any simple pigeon-hole. Those who sensed something uneasy unfolding lacked all conviction, while the wannabe panto crowd were full of passionate intensity.

Don’t get me wrong. The Red Shoes is certainly funny. As adoptive parents Marianne and Bob Nugent, Dianne Pilkington and James Doherty are gleefully evil in their wicked stepmother/distracted stepfather roles. They perfectly conjure up a nouveau-riche, Liverpudlian, entrepreneur couple from the mid-1990s (Nugent = ‘new gent’), with Bob constantly jabbing at his PDA and Marianne desperate to join the Board of a local charity. The unnervingly random element in their roles is the hard-to-shake question at the back of your head, Why is this show satirizing Liverpudlian nouveau-riche entrepreneurs of the 1990s? Equally, Sebastien Torkia, as the creepy shoemaker/priest/narrator Sylvestor, has a great line in macabre rhymes and even macabrer eyebrows as he chats menacingly with the audience. This is not the cuddly humour of your usual Christmas fare. We’re closer to Mark Gatiss’s seasonal horror than Ian McKellen’s Widow Twanky. As my companion commented, Torkia feels much more like the MC from Cabaret than your standard fairytale toymaker.

Andersen’s original story was a cautionary morality tale about the consequences of excessive indulgence and lack of respect for the Church. With its horrific scenes of foot amputation and eternal damnation it leant brilliantly into the Brothers Grimm school of scary-fairy. In 1948 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film adaptation recognised that the innocent teenager at the heart of the story isn’t, in the words of Frank N. Furter, ‘really to blame’, and shifted responsibility onto Anton Walbrook’s dictatorial choreographer Lermontov. But, with the exception of its stunningly expressionistic ballet sequence, that film feels awkward and wooden today (unlike Powell and Pressburger’s other work). Now, Nancy Harris’s stunningly individual adaptation makes no compromises to audience expectations. It uncovers serious themes in the story, but it has the boldness to laugh at those themes even as it explores their depths.

In Harris’s hands, The Red Shoes is a song of Innocence and Corruption – and, perversely, how welcome that corruption is. Sylvestor shouts at Karen (Nikki Cheung), ‘Seize this chance!’ and it’s as close as this show comes to a message. Like Oscar Wilde, Harris chooses the aesthetic over the deep and meaningful, and the result is both a pleasure and a puzzle. Styles and snippets from a lifetime of inspiration flit across the stage: a magic mirror from Snow White, the discarded slippers and foot-fitting Prince of Cinderella, a dance sequence straight out of Bob Fosse, a twirl of the legs lifted from that other icon of Liverpudlian humour Kenny Everett in his unforgettable ‘Cupid Stunt’ character (how did he get away with that?), and the odd moment of torture-porn redolent more of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed than Raymond Briggs’ Snowman.

And Cheung’s dancing is mesmeric. Stylistically, she captures both the romantic sweeps of Moira Shearer from 1948’s movie and the helplessly robotic nature of being literally carried away by your own ungovernable feet. Both beautiful and bizarre, her movement embodies the production.

The Red Shoes looks fantastic and fantastical. Where the RSC’s School for Scandal from earlier this year was bathed in pink, this is bathed in blood red, and design elements appear more like half-remembered moments from nightmares than stage sets: human legs emerging upside down from below the stage, wintry trees descending from the sky, an amputation scene that looks like it was dreamt up by Roald Dahl after an evening of Chinese shadow puppetry. At one moment there’s a supremely effective illusion of Karen’s legless feet continuing to dance while being carried around the audience by Clive the axeman. In Nancy Harris’s words, it’s a ‘marshmallow tablecloth’ of a production – it makes sense, but on its own terms.

Ultimately, maybe this really is a children’s show. Like Lewis Carroll with Alice in Wonderland or Hayao Miyazaki with Spirited Away, Harris recognises that children don’t need things to make that kind of plodding sense adults yearn for. The Red Shoes feeds the hunger of boundless imagination. It may leave audiences confused or it may leave them enchanted, and I think it would like to do both. Undoubtedly it will divide opinion. But the Shoemaker’s final, beguiling line shows how far we’ve come from Andersen’s original: ‘And the moral… Who wants morals?’