Review: THE CAR MAN, Sadler's Wells

The tall, dark and handsome Luca swaggers into Harmony (population 375, and dropping) looking less like a drifter than an escapee from a protein powder advert, and Matthew Bourne's dance-noir wastes no time weaponising that effect. Under a sign reading "Man Wanted," the garage owner Dino offers him work and his wife Lana offers considerably more; before the interval is out, so has the gentle mechanic Angelo. Man wanted, indeed.

The title suggests Bizet’s Carmen, but the acquaintance is brushing at best. The actual bones of the drama comes from an incestuous pairing: James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice ponies up the plot while Luchino Visconti’s cheeky adaptation Ossessione provides the service station setting; Ivo van Hove staged the latter in 2017 with a stripped-down and oiled-up Jude Law but no such luck here. Even the score is secondhand — the Bizet score comes via Rondin Shchedrin's pared back Carmen Suite before Terry Davies gets his hands on it. 

Despite all those influences, paradoxically this is Bourne at his most direct. Freed from the marquee pressure of Swan Lake or Romeo and Juliet, he stops referencing and starts telling. This wordless dance-theatre is, for better and worse — as straightforward as it gets for ballet. The sex and the violence have both mellowed with age (twenty-five years will do that), but the choreography's grip on narrative hasn't slackened an inch.

Will Bozier's Luca arrives with swagger to spare and a set of pecs with their own postcode. Along with the obligatory bag slung over his shoulder, he carries with him a superb sense of mystery, with the later regret expressed more through choreography than anything Bozier finds in the body language. Ashley Shaw does the harder job well: Lana's role has always veered into clichéd femme-fatale territory but Shaw's face and posture quietly do excellent work in making us believe the disaffected woman’s plight.You believe the boredom, and you believe the complicity that follows it. 

Danny Reubens' Dino is a convincingly loathsome cuckold that never tips over into cartoon. The evening, though, belongs to Harry Ondrak-Wright's Angelo, who goes from bullied outsider to hardened patsy inside a single interval and makes every step of that journey utterly plausible. His prison-set brawls with Rita (Anna-Maria De Freitas, sharp and unsentimental) land a world away from the heat of Act One, and land harder for it.

Davies' score still earns its keep. The Luca-Lana couplings get pounding percussion to match their ardour, while the Luca-Angelo material is allowed to breathe, its eroticism a sparky contrast. 

Lez Brotherston's design does sterling work throughout before pulling out some surprises. The garage-diner is exactly the greasy mid-century America you'd expect before we are plunged into a two-car drag race staged with full-size vehicles and screaming engines. After the interval, the set switches to a prison and a nightclub conjured with enough space left over for the dancers to still make their points. Chris Davey's lighting keeps the whole thing crepuscular and coiled; even now, this comes across like a night at the cinema rather than an antique being dusted off for another viewing.

Unlike most of Bourne’s repertoire, nothing here is subtle. And, importantly, nor does it pretend to be. This remains after all this time a genuine thriller albeit one built on bodies rather than plot twists, and one that leaves Harmony's sign a little smaller on population by the time the lights come up.

The Car Man continues at Sadler's Wells until 29 August.

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