At every turn in Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man, references to other stories pop up. There are the murderous sexual shenanigans of The Postman Always Rings Twice, a squad of Italian-American punks who could hold their own on the mean streets of West Side Story, a duelling cars scene from Rebel Without a Cause, even hints of Puccini’s Il tabarro. What it definitely isn’t, and deliberately so, is a representation of Bizet’s Carmen, while grounded in its superb music.
This disjunction may be why I find the piece tricky. Hearing re-orchestrated extracts from the poignant arias Bizet gave Micaela while her Bourne-again counterpart, Rita (Anna Maria de Freitas on my visit), performs yearning duets with introverted Angelo (Harry Ondrak-Wright), my brain regularly has to recalibrate. This couple are the outliers in this rough’n’tough community, she more demure than the rest of the ballsy women, he a bullied cleaner at the autoshop that seems to employ most of the young men of Harmony, USA, “population 375”. Bizet’s Micaela is so chaste, though, that it comes as a shock to hear her evoked in moves that suggestively entwine Rita with Angelo, desperate for a connection with him.
Rita is the best behaved character in the piece, brave when it’s called for, but she’s not really its heroine; neither is Lana (Ashley Shaw), the strongest female character. You search the cast, too, for an equivalent to Don Escamillo, the lauded bullfighter who attracts the flighty Carmen. But there are no real heroes here; this is noir territory, where all are mortal and fallible. Lana (Ashley Shaw), wife of Dino, the sad-sack owner of the autoshop and diner, is feisty and bold, but she has none of Carmen’s ambiguous allure. Bizet’s cigarette factory worker is a life force whose passion is attractive, as well as dangerous. But Lana seems to exist more as a reflection of her lover Luca’s magnetism rather a proudly independent woman. These dramaturgical decisions don’t work for me.
But there is still much to enjoy. The (vocals-free) score is pleasurable in itself: a witty, versatile interpretation of the original music, heavy on percussion. The xylophone-player, in particular, has a field day. It works a treat, punchy yet lyrical: you can see why Bourne was drawn to this kind of re-orchestration when he first heard Shchedrin’s 40-minute Carmen Suite — incorporated here, with Terry Davies adding to it in the same style. It screams out to be danced to.
The dancers, as ever, are hugely impressive. Their moves here are often like a wildly magnified barn dance, the men hurling themselves into rolls and raising their legs at exaggerated angles, shouting out as they go. In one rousing section, almost the whole company launches into a boisterous line dance. Will Bozier (pictured above with Ashley Shaw) is a truly hunky Luca, the drifter who acts as a catalyst for the drama to come. He’s bisexual, usefully causing trouble in two different directions, as Angelo (a compellingly tortured Ondrak-Wright) comes under his spell, along with sultry Lana Not to be overlooked is Danny Reubens’s Dino, a classic unappealing husband, though increasingly sympathetic as his wife proves treacherous. Reubens give him a human dimension, a man out of his depth alongside two much more ruthless players.
Lez Brotherston’s set-design never ceases to amaze, somehow making room for several classic American cars, an upstairs row of showers and a room with a handy window, a diner with tables to one side, and, towering over it all, a giant billboard displaying a lurid, menacing sunset that purports to welcome strangers to the town. It’s almost too overt a sign of the trouble to come.
Re-seeing a Bourne piece you always notice lovely details: the “steam” surrounding the men in the shower room; the moment at which a yellow amorphous mass inside a steamed-up car becomes a recognisable couple having sex; the jukebox Dino thumps to get another Bizet “track”; the pausing of the line dance in a series of freezeframes as the death-motif intrudes, as if done by an invisible camera, whose loud shutter click we hear.
There’s often larky material, too. Here it comes In the second half, “six months later”, when Brotherston turns the autoshop into a modish cabaret club, Le Beat-Route, run by a glamorous vamp in a cocktail dress. Here one of my favourite Bourne dance-spoofs is presented, as if it’s the club’s cabaret act: two men and a woman in black (the men with black berets) who seem to be modelled on Marcel Marceau enacting a love triangle in melodramatic comedic mime. It’s a sweet little bit of horseplay, shadowing the wider mayhem of the plot’s tangled trios.
The problem for me comes when the big showdown arrives and you don’t know who you are rooting for. (Other than hoping the blameless Rita doesn’t become a victim.) Dance noir’s amoral territory has its limitations. But strictly as a dance piece, this is spectacular to look at, impeccably staged and performed with limitless brio.
- The Car Man at Sadler’s Wells until 29 August
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