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.
