Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man is a steamy, pulp-fiction take on the opera Carmen. Its object of desire is Luca, a sweaty hunk who has drifted into a small town in 1950s America, where he two-times his lovers: Lana, the sultry wife of the local garage owner, and Angelo, a gentle, bullied young man who doesn’t fit the macho girls-and-gangs culture around him. The show was a hit when first performed in 2000, acclaimed for its potent mix-up of gender and genre (buffs will have fun spotting the film references, the nods to ballets, modern dance and musicals, and savouring the retro designs and iconography). Now it is back in a scaled-up version – bigger! bolder! beefier! – for a limited run at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
What this vast auditorium loses – some pressure-cooker intensity, some dramatic detail – the production makes up for. The fantastically versatile, multilevel set cleverly incorporates a live orchestra and billboard screens; it can switch scenes at the flick of a light switch, and extends along a thrust stage down which the dancers can parade or hurtle. The amplified music combines numbers from Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite with sound effects, so that it serves as both orchestral score and cinema soundtrack.
Bourne ties the choreography tightly to the storytelling. After the initial scene-setting group numbers, act one is sparked, driven and finally combusted by carnal lust: Luca (Will Bozier in tonight’s production; there are two alternating casts) has a grapplesome coupling with smouldering Lana (Zizi Strallen), followed swiftly by an enthusiastic back-seat ride with smitten Angelo (Paris Fitzpatrick) that sets the whole car quivering. The rest of the cast, having swapped and tasted each other’s cigarettes, break out into polymorphous rutting – not so much sex between individual people as Eros unleashed. If the ensemble choreography tends towards blockiness, it’s the partnering that matters here: limb-tangling, boundary-breaking, power-shifting and space-devouring.
In true potboiler style, sex leads to deceit and violence, and act two is fuelled by guilt and revenge. The lead dancers carry the story with full-bodied conviction, but the entire cast seem to relish their roles in a work that is outrageously melodramatic and deeply serious, classy and trashy, manipulative and sincere. Like Luca himself, The Car Man brazenly gets to have it both ways.
At the Royal Albert Hall, London, until 19 June
