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

The Midnight Bell - Review

Sadler's Wells, London

***

Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne

The company of The Midnight Bell

Inspired by the novels of Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell plunges us into the murky, world of 1930s Soho. And there, thanks to Paule Constable’s gloomy lighting, it remains for one hour and fifty minutes (apart from a twenty minute interval). While Lez Brotherston's set design is atmospheric, the action is not always visible. That the follow-spots sometimes fail to light their intended subject doesn’t help matters. 

The titular Midnight Bell is a pub where various people – lonely, listless, cocky or whatever – meet. Most are looking for love or sex in some form or other, with some of the encounters working out better than others.  

Of course the choreography is sensitive, imaginative and very watchable. Some of the gestures are witty too and it’s all very human. This is Matthew Bourne, after all, and he’s a master of his own form of body language.  But the story telling is too vague and given the shadowy lighting it’s often hard to distinguish one character from another although each is, apparently, drawn specifically from the novels. 

Terry Davies’s evocative music, pre-recorded by an eleven piece orchestra with a singer, fits the mood of the piece perfectly. He deploys an effective use of voice, sailing over the top of the musical texture, to create mystery, sadness or wistfulness. Like Bourne, Davies is very good at evoking mood with, for example, a minimalist percussion rhythm accompanying a sex scene in a seedy hotel that is aurally arresting. Less successful is the use of characters miming 1930s songs which simply feels lazy. Dance in general, and ballet in particular, is a non-verbal medium and the songs are a jarring interruption. 

This revival of The Midnight Bell, first seen in 2023, is reasonably enjoyable theatre, athough the second half drags. Not Matthew Bourne’s finest.

Runs until 21st June, then on tour.

Photo credit: Johan Persson

Reviewed by Nicola Klein

The Car Man - Review

Royal Albert Hall, London

*****

Directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne

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

Will Bozier

More than twenty years after Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man, his ballet inspired by Bizet’s Carmen, premiered in Plymouth the show returns to London playing at the Royal Albert Hall as a part of its 150th anniversary and marking the first time that Bourne has ever staged a production in the landmark London venue. No expense has been spared in this revival, with the director/choreographer fielding a cast three times the size of his original 2020 company.

The plot’s inspiration may hail from Carmen, but the aura of The Car Man hails from Hollywood. Set amidst an Italian-American community in the USA’s Midwest, the action plays out in the fictitious town of Harmony, a name that is as ironic as its images are iconic. This is a town of billboards, tumbleweed and Dino’s eponymous automobile repair shop, where the car men work. The music is from Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite supplemented by additional composition from Terry Davies, with the opera’s fabulously familiar melodies delivered to perfection under  Brett Morris’ baton, fused into mouthwatering leitmotifs that emerge through the two hour show.

Zizi Strallen

Bourne’s protagonists are a quintet made up of the abusive Dino who is also the owner of the town’s diner, his wife Lana, her sister Rita together with Angelo, a hired help and Luca an itinerant drifter whose arrival leads to the destruction of Harmony’s harmony. This review will not reveal how the five’s smouldering passions ignite, but remember that this is Carmen-themed where lust, jealousy, and murder have to fuel the narrative. Bourne’s vision is as bold as it is beautiful and bloody, with his characters’ sexualities straddling their desires and all leading to an inevitable and heartbreaking revenge.

Will Bozier is Luca the titular car man, with the practically perfect Zizi Strallen opposite him as Lana. Both of these performers are outstanding in their dance and acting and where the intimate nuance of stolen glances can so easily be lost in the Royal Albert Hall’s vastness, the billboards that double up as projection screens show occasional snatches of beautifully filmed lingering glances in true Sunset Boulevard style close-up. Strallen is wondrous in portraying both her allure to Luca and also in capturing quite how irresistible she finds him to be. Mary Poppins she ain’t!

Will Bozier and Zizi Strallen

Bozier is all muscle and movement. A guy who cannot keep it in his trousers and to whom any hole is a potential goal. Oozing testosterone, his is a role of almost perpetual or potential conflict or coitus. Physically demanding, Bozier’s performance is breathtaking.

Paris Fitzpatrick’s Angelo is the more diminutive of the younger guys, clearly vulnerable and at times violently violated and abused. Integral to the plot, his is a carefully delivered role. Likewise Kayla Collymore’s Rita. While hers may be the more marginal of the principal roles, Collymore dances with an assured and nuanced sensitivity.

Kayla Collymore and Paris Fitzpatrick

The middle-aged, flabby Dino is played here by Alan Vincent, a neat touch being that back in the day at the show’s Plymouth premiere, it had been Vincent who created the role of Luca. At the Royal Albert Hall however, Vincent captures the rage of the cuckolded Mediterranean exquisitely. And as is so often the way with a New Adventures production Lez Brotherston’s design work shifts the audience from London’s south-west to America’s mid-west effortlessly. 

For more than two decades The Car Man has been lifting the hood on modern dance, treating its audience to a powerful spectacle of music and dance that stirs the soul and pulsates the emotions. If you’ve seen it before, then you need to revisit this outing to wonder at how Bourne’s company fill the Royal Albert Hall. And if you haven’t seen it, then all the more reason to grasp the opportunity right now. Either way, just go!

The Company

Runs until 19th June

Photo credit: Johan Persson