Edward Scissorhands @ Liverpool Empire

Opening with Danny Elfman's score from the original film, Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands enchants its audience before the curtain is lifted. Impressive set design coupled with clever use of projection and lighting successfully brings to life Edward’s mystical, shadowy world and vividly juxtaposes with the colourful backdrop of 1950s American suburbia.

Inspired by writer Tim Burton’s own feelings of alienation during his adolescence, Edward Scissorhands tells the story of the protagonist’s attempt to find love and acceptance in the suburbs, where conservatism and all-American ideals are prized and any difference is met with suspicion and distrust. In Bourne’s dance and movement based retelling, Edward’s drastic differences to those around him are shown in sharper focus. Characters' only means of communication is their physicality and this is particularly potent in the scenes featuring the energetic and sexually charged teenagers. Edward’s physical deformities and initially stiff and uneasy movement show him to be always just out of sync with the community he and others want him to belong to.

In some ways the replacement of his hands with scissors allow Edward to express himself, finding ways to create art in the common rose bushes of suburbia – but the fact remains that his unique attributes symbolise an ever-present threat to the cosy neighbourhood (perhaps indicative of the way Burton viewed the reception of his own creative nature during his youth).

Among the show’s most memorable moments is the scene in which Edward and Kim dance together in the snow, an interaction laden with all the sentiment attached to forbidden love and the innocent desires of youth. If you were to look for criticism in the piece, it would perhaps lie in the need for a longer lead in to this moment, but the closing scene hits all the right notes and inspires the appropriate concluding emotion in this beautifully told story.