The Car Man - Review

Sadler's Wells, London

*****

Music by Terry Davies and Rodion Shchedrin's Carmen Suite (after Bizet's Carmen)

Directed and choregraphed by Matthew Bourne

The company of The Car Man

Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man is more than just a ballet. This modern classic that was first performed some 20 years ago is a homage to both cinema and opera delivered through the sublime fusion of dance.

Inspired by Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, Bourne translates the tale of simmering lust, jealousy, revenge and murder from 19th century Spain to America’s 1950s Midwest and the small town of Harmony. Where Bizet’s opera was set in and around a tobacco factory in Seville, Bourne’s action focusses on Dino’s car repair shop and diner that sits at the heart of the town’s Hispanic community. Lana is Dino’s smoulderingly beautiful and profoundly frustrated wife, and when  handsome drifter Luca arrives in town looking for work, Lana finds him irresistible. Throw in the subplot of a romance between locals Angelo and Rita and with Bourne adding a strand of bisexuality to the plot, the components are all in place for a story that proves as tragic as it is grippingly exciting throughout.

Bourne’s New Adventures company alternate the principal roles throughout the run and on the evening of this review, the characters were danced thus:

LUCA - Will Bozier

LANA - Ashley Shaw

ANGELO - Harry Ondrak-Wright

RITA – Anna-Maria De Freitas

DINO - Danny Reubens

The evening’s music is drawn from the Carmen Suite, Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin's Bolshoi Ballet version of Bizet's original, with additional music by composer Terry Davies and of course, the melodies work beautifully. For opera buffs, the score respects Bizet’s brilliant original, while for those in the audience whose knowledge may be more confined to Now That’s What I Call Opera highlights, all the classic tunes are there. The Habanera plays as a recurring motif throughout the evening, while to have the car mechanics taking a steamy shower after a hard day’s labour, to the Prelude from Carmen, is a moment of rare, comically choreographed genius. 

As is to be expected, the acting and dance are beyond flawless. Rage, passion and desire are all palpably conveyed through the dancers’ faces and bodies, with the story's twists and turns all proving incredibly easy to follow.

Lez Brotherston (who else?) has designed the set with a staging that incorporates nods to film as well as Americana, with the town’s jailhouse and nightclub, as well as the workshop (complete with the arcing flickers of welders’ torches) all woven seamlessly into the tale.  

That Bourne’s choreography includes a car race between two rival gangs of young men (think of Grease and you’re getting close) only emphasises the creative mastery of this, our finest choreographer.

At Sadler’s Wells for the rest of August and then on tour. UNMISSABLE!

Runs until 29th August, then on tour.

Photo credit: Johan Persson

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake - The Next Generation - Review

Sadler's Wells, London

*****

Composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne

The Company

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, now badged “The Next Generation”, plays at Sadler’s Wells over the festive season. This remarkable ballet that has literally introduced and inspired generations of young people into the world of dance remains a radical re-imagination of the classic gothic fantasy.

Bourne’s interpretation veers away from magic and enchantment. His is a modern world of challenged mental health, of society’s demanding expectations, and of a young Prince grappling to define his sexuality – all danced to Tchaikovsky’s music.

On the night of this review The Prince was magnificently danced by Stephen Murray. The show’s principal dancer however is given a gruelling two-role responsibility with this review seeing Harrison Dowzell take the parts of both The Swan and The Stranger. Dowzell is sensational throughout. His Swan, a creation of The Prince’s troubled mind, moves with an avian power and grace that is compelling. Matthew Bourne’s interpretation is very dark, with a tragic climax to the show that reflects Dowzell’s hypnotic influence over the damaged young Prince.

The complementing role that falls to Dowzell is as the charismatic Stranger who appears at the palace ball. Teeming with testosterone, Dowzell asserts himself as the alpha human male, truly the balls of the ball, sweeping all the Princesses - and then the Prince – off their feet. Dowzell’s contribution to an evening of scorching dance-fuelled drama is simply breathtaking.

Of course, it is not just The Swan that stuns. As Bourne’s corps of Swans, all bare-chested and clad in Lez Brotherston’s now famous swan-leg costumes fill the stage, the beauty of the director's vision is ingenious. Their perfect poise and movement only heightening the painful poignancy of the Prince’s mental decline. Rarely have a flock of birds looked so ripped!

Ashley Shaw danced The Queen for this performance as Katrina Lyndon played The Girlfriend. Shaw has long impressed on these pages in her work for Bourne – here, supported by subtle hair and makeup enhancements, she convincingly plays a role way beyond her years as the matriarch emotionally disconnected from her damaged son. Shaw shows sheer talent in a critically important supporting role. Lyndon (also the show’s dance captain) makes the most of a slighter role, mixing moments of comedy with perfectly weighted vacuity as she delivers the complex part of the young woman whom The Prince, at first, so passionately desires.

Brotherston’s set design is, as always, a treat, while in the pit, Benjamin Pope conducts the New Adventures Orchestra through a fabulous delivery of Tchaikovsky’s work. Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake remains a chillingly exhilarating evening of dance.

Runs until 26th January 2025 then on tour

Photo credit: Johan Persson

The Red Shoes - Review

Sadler’s Wells, London


*****


Based on the film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
and the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne

Adam Cooper, Stephen Murray, Cordelia Braithwaite

Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes returns to Sadler’s Wells three years after it first premiered - and while the score and dance remain exquisite, there is a depth to this ballet that has only matured over time.

This time around, Bernard Herrmann’s score is played live with the ingenious transposition of work from his various movie compositions flowing so seamlessly around Bourne’s creation, that one senses the music could almost have been commissioned for this production.

The movement of course is exquisite in its story of a doomed love triangle that evolves within the Ballet Lermontov. A love blossoms between ballerina Victoria Page and Julian Craster a young composer at the ballet, while throughout Boris Lermontov, the company’s impresario harbours his own lustful desire for Page. Alongside this cocktail of human passion, there is within the tale, The Red Shoes Ballet itself, a Lermontov production that tells of the enchanted/cursed shoes, and the macabre power they can exert over their wearer.

On press night Ashley Shaw played Page, Dominic North, Craster and Adam Cooper, Lermontov with all three impeccable in their bringing to life the tragic romance. As the narrative shifts across Britain and France their dance, and of course the work of their fellow corps of dancers, allows this difficult and disturbing love story to unfold before us. In the 2019 iteration however, the psychology of the story’s underlying emotional complexities is even more vivid than three years ago. Unquestionably dark and yet stunningly portrayed, Bourne captures the gothic horror of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale and imbues it with a believable 20th-century relevance.

Lez Brotherston’s ingenious swivelling proscenium arch remains a masterclass in stage design, as Brett Morris conducts the New Adventures Orchestra with a heart-soaring fluidity. Playing into the new year, The Red Shoes continues to offer an evening of world class entertainment and dance.

Playing at Sadler’s Wells until 19th January 2020, then touring
Photo credit: Johan Persson

Cinderella - Review

Sadler's Wells, London

*****

Music by Prokofiev

Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne

Liam Mower and Ashley Shaw

Witty, gothic and yet strangely enchanting, Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella returns to Sadler’s Wells for the festive season before heading out on tour. Where last year’s Christmas offering from Bourne’s New Directions company was The Red Shoes, this year it’s all about the glass (or rather, the sparkling diamanté) slippers as the classic fairytale, scored by Prokofiev is translated onto London during the Blitz of 1940.

Bourne’s Second World War staging was first aired in 1997, before a revival in 2010 leading to this 2017 slightly re-worked reprise and it makes for an uncompromising interpretation of the famous yarn. The best fairytales have always melded magic with monstrosity and Bourne’s vision upholds that fusion as goodness fights to triumph over evil.

The psychodrama here however is harrowing. We all know how the tale traditionally pans out, the wickedness of its opening chapters defining Cinderella’s family. Bourne however takes the darkness deeper. One of Cinderella’s step-brothers attempts to molest her, her stepmother tries to murder her and even the show’s hero - in this narrative a downed RAF pilot - is shown to be both physically and morally flawed.

In removing the traditional "royalty and castle" from the story, Bourne still preserves the classic three acts. The first depicts Cinderella’s domestic misery. The second, famously the Ball, is here shifted to London’s Café de Paris on the night that the venue was (as tragically occurred in real life) bombed during a German air raid.

The third sees the pilot searching London’s streets and tube station blitz shelters for the beautiful woman whose shimmering slipper he retained after she was taken away injured from the explosion. Bourne lobs in some novel twists, but rest assured there’s a pleasingly happy ending.

Ashley Shaw again assumes the responsibility of leading ballerina, in the title role and, as in The Red Shoes, is magnificent. Without referencing the technical intricacies of Bourne’s choreography, suffice to say that Shaw translates poetry into movement. Her love, desire and fears are all exquisitely portrayed in a performance that appears as exhaustingly athletic as it is artistically beautiful.

Opposite Shaw is Andrew Monaghan as Harry, the Pilot. Wounded and bomber-jacketed, he’s not the fairytale’s handsome Prince, rather a decently loving (and beautifully danced) everyman, who falls for the downtrodden heroine.

There’s not a fairy godmother to be found here. Instead, Liam Mower dances The Angel, gifted with magical powers to make Cinderella’s wish come true. Mower too is magnificent.

Amongst an excellent cast, a nod to Michela Meazza as Sybil the Stepmother. Bourne’s programme notes acknowledge a reference in Sybil to the 1940’s screen legend Joan Crawford – and Meazza beautifully embodies the aura of Crawford’s cruel mystique.

The influence of cinema again pervades Bourne’s work. There is a broad monochrome ambience throughout, interspersed with vivid flashes of colour, alongside assorted hints to movie classics that captured the 1940s. The reference to Brief Encounter in the final act (albeit without the standard Rachmaninov soundtrack) is a particular treat.

Bourne's dark interpretation of the story sits at odds with our expectations of the Cinderella narrative. But the challenge is a good one that creates a stunning interpretation that holds a mirror up to ourselves. Catch it now at Sadler’s Wells – or make every effort to see this enchanting ballet as it tours the country.

Runs until 27th January 2018, then tours. Touring dates here.

Photo credit: Johan Persson

The Red Shoes - Review

Sadler's Wells, London


*****


Based on the film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
and the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne

Ashley Shaw

The influences of cinema on Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes are everywhere. Walking into Sadler's Wells one sees that the stage is hidden behind an old style cinema curtain. The impression is both enchanting and effective, for Bourne’s latest offering is, in its elements, a ballet about a movie, about a ballet.

In the way that, back in 1948, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created the Oscar winning movie that itself had been inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale - so too, nearly 70 years later has Bourne taken that movie and re-imagined it onto the dance stage. 

But this ballet is so much more than a glorious re-imagining of a classic film - for where Powell and Pressburger invited Brian Easdale to score the movie, Bourne has actually shifted his musical focus to Easdale's contemporary (and fellow Academy Award winner) Bernard Herrmann - and assisted by Terry Davies' magnificent orchestrations, a new musical composition for the ballet has been carefully stitched together, drawn entirely from Hermann's scores. The choice of music is inspired - and as cigarette smoke hangs in the air of nearly every scene, whilst the shoes may be red, the very essence of this production is noir.

The story revolves around Victoria Page, prima ballerina in the Ballet Lermontov and her role within "The Red Shoes" ballet within a ballet. The first half spills across locations in London and Monte Carlo and as Page moves closer to the first half's closing routine of the Red Shoes ballet itself, a doomed love triangle emerges. Boris Lermontov burns with an unrequited jealous desire for his star. Page however only has eyes for Julian Craster (Lermontov's orchestra conductor) and it is clear that both she and Craster are madly in love with each other.

Act Two tracks the trio across Europe and as much as Bourne's visionary choreography relates the narrative, so too does Lez Brotherston's stage design, with curves of balustrade immediately evoking the French Riviera. Brotherston draws upon the simplest concepts of design, married to 21st century technology. Suspended from a gantry, that itself moves across the stage in a way that the Starlight Express designers could only have dreamed of, the aforementioned cinema curtains evolve into the proscenium arches of opera houses, before melding into tugged back glimpses of the triangle's respective boudoirs as passions smoulder. Elsewhere, Brotherston’s evocation of a Monte Carlo steam engine is every bit as effective as his creation of a Mississippi steamboat for Sheffield's Showboat last Christmas.

But the beauty of a Bourne ballet is the visionary dance. As Victoria Page, Ashley Shaw drives the show, a mixture of poised passion and pathos. Bourne coaxes so much expression from her, both facial and in her movement, that the story flows effortlessly. Sam Archer and Dominic North as Lermontov and Craster respectively offer equally poised and perfectly weighted support to Page's arc. 

The Red Shoes Ballet sequence itself is of course enchanting. Duncan McLean’s projections providing a eerily ethereal backdrop to Bourne’s interpretation of the fairy tale. Alongside Shaw, Michela Meazza, Liam Mower and Glenn Graham as key dancers in the Ballet Lermontov provide a perfect complement to the story's detail. 

Sold out at Sadler's Wells for the rest of the run, a continued bravo to Sir Matthew and his New Adventures company for spending the next six gruelling months on the road, touring The Red Shoes around the UK. Whether one is a lifelong ballet devotee, or completely new to the genre, the show is unmissable. Kill to get a ticket!

Runs until 29th January 2017 - Then on tour. Tour details here

Photo credit: Johan Persson

Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty - Review

Sadler's Wells

*****

Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne

Ashley Shaw

Charles Perrault's classic fairy tale comes to the stage this season as Matthew Bourne completes his trilogy of Tchaikovsky's complete ballets. Sleeping Beauty (originally premiered in 2012) follows Swan Lake and The Nutcracker in typical Bourne style - it is clever, gripping and awe-inspiring.

Bourne pushes the boundaries of contemporary dance with striking choreography, so those looking for a typically Disney-esque treatment complete with dancers en pointe, will need to look elsewhere. But to anyone who is keen to experience the best of a small, innovative and enthralling company, this Sleeping Beauty is a delight.

The story is divided into four acts, each spanning a different period in time and - augmented by Lez Brotherston's fantastic costuming and set design - takes the audience on a journey through dance history. Beginning in 1890, with a nod to classical ballet, the tale progresses through 1911 to today, with movement on the more modern side of contemporary.

It is Bourne's desire to incorporate the 100 year sleep of Princess Aurora into the production that plays a pivotal role in this version of Sleeping Beauty, laying the gothic foundations of this self-described 'gothic romance.' The fairies are vampires, allowing the story to jump into the future without losing its characters to the mortal rite of death. And while there are dark undertones, an original use of puppetry also maintains the element of comedy.

Highlights include the dance of the fairies, which sees six striking solos merging neatly into one stellar piece; a scene set in the 'land of sleepwalkers' with fluid movements and the majority of the company on stage; and the wedding scene which, with its harsh undertones and choreography reminiscent of Christopher Bruce's Rooster, is truly captivating.

While these scenes may not sound familiar, it is worth noting that for all of the liberties Bourne has taken in telling this classic story, it firmly remains faithful to a “once upon a time” beginning and a delightfully happy ending.

Performances by Dominic North, as Leo the Royal Gamekeeper and Adam Maskell, as Carabosse the dark fairy and her son Caradoc are noteworthy. Both embody the spirit of their characters seemingly with ease - as the sweet and ever faithful Leo and sinister villains respectively. And Ashley Shaw's Princess Aurora is spell-binding, capturing the essence of the mischievous yet lovable royal daughter perfectly.

An outstanding production, in terms of originality, creativity and majesty, Sleeping Beauty is an unmissable masterpiece.

Runs until 26th January 2016

Guest reviewer: Bhakti Gajjar