Review: Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man, Sadler’s Wells ★★★★★

Matthew Bourne’s sizzling ballet noir, The Car Man, turns Bizet’s Carmen into a dark, sensual, and unforgettable stage thriller.

Matthew Bourne takes familiar music, recognizable settings, classic film noir, and standard dance forms, only to twist them into something utterly and unmistakably his own. The Car Man is simmering, sizzling and dark, and Bizet’s Carmen has certainly been re-ignited, as the show’s subtitle promises. It tells a story classic film noir never could: desire, yes; murder, absolutely; but also the fluid ambiguity of bisexuality, a line 1940s Hollywood never dared cross.

The Car Man began life in 2000 at Theatre Royal Plymouth, before transferring to the Old Vic for a run that drew Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, won the Evening Standard Award for Musical Event of that year and picked up an Olivier nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Dance. It hasn’t toured the UK for over ten years, aside from a one-off revival at the Royal Albert Hall in 2022.

Twenty-six years on from its premiere, it remains a rarity: the first ballet to depict bisexuality as a major part of the plot, and it is folded into the story naturally rather than made a point of. Some Bourne ballets need a plot summary to follow (The Red Shoes, Swan Lake), but this one stays clear even in its flashback and haunting scenes. Hints of Spanish dance and evocations of American social line dance forms run through the choreography too, giving the piece a strong sense of both culture and place.

The score, by Terry Davies, carries clear undertones of Bizet, filtered through Rodion Shchedrin‘s string-and-percussion arrangement. It gives us the hints of the Bizet we love without ever feeling like a replica.

Originally subtitled An Auto-Erotic Thriller, the show is steamy and highly suggestive throughout. Sadler’s Wells suggests an age guidance of 12+, but at Red Bus we would advise that this seriously sexy evening suits an older audience. This isn’t just a story of seduction, though. The violation running through the piece is tastefully handled, but still painful to watch: we see women and one man mistreated, male rape, domestic violence. Bourne captures the braggadocio and machismo of the men, but it is the women who egg them on. A recurring motif of wide, outstretched hands between the legs transforms touch into something invasive rather than intimate. Lustful, sultry, and dangerous throughout, this is definitely an adults-only performance.

Throughout, everyday occurrences and items become inspiration: kneading dough becomes sound and dance, chairs turn into props and instruments, boots become percussion. Alongside the score, Bourne leans into natural sound too: silence, cicadas, a dancer’s breath, a single castanet, building tension or adding to a mounting unease.

At the centre of this story is Ashley Shaw who captures Lana with chilling accuracy, a woman trapped in a domestic snare, desperate for seduction, devastatingly cruel to save herself. Every part of her body is used, a lift of the eye, the crook of a lip, and her partnership with Will Bozier‘s Luca oozes pleasure, her body melting into him, where she is rigid and aloof with husband Dino (Danny Reubens), wiping away an unwanted kiss the moment his back is turned. Bozier draws the eye in every scene even as he integrates into the town. Reubens is gratifyingly unpleasant as Lana’s heartless husband, oozing malevolence, easy to despise, and a truly gruesome ghost.

The ensemble pieces are a particular pleasure, brilliantly capturing the coupled reality of small-town life as Bourne pairs the dancers off in relentless parallel duets. The choreography plays constantly with levels, with dancers leaping into soaring lifts one moment, then rolling into heavy weight-sharing, with bodies leaning into and over one another: every physical interaction feels raw, earthy, and fraught with tension. The hoe-down style sequences, of a kind you might see on a West End stage, are performed here with a technical precision that goes well beyond it. Bourne’s dancers are all exceptional.

Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures The Car Man

Photo credit: Johan Persson

The set, designed by Lez Brotherston, moves easily from a careworn town to a shiny, cold institutional prison and a garishly bright nightclub. Small amusements are built in (the nightclub is Le Beat Route, the town, far from harmonious, is called Harmony). Set changes are built seamlessly into the choreography, so that scenes transform almost without our noticing. The two vehicles onstage are especially effective, as is an early shower scene which stays just the right side of decent thanks to a well-placed bar and ample steam. The set is used at every level, with dancers rolling on and across car bonnets, over dining tables, and on a two-storey structure which doubles as prison and the garage owner’s apartment. The set, costumes, and choreography work together so that everyone on stage has a distinct role, whether mechanic, customer, or diner worker. A costume change in Act II, boots gone, heels on, signals the move into the city.

Lighting does much of the storytelling too: a sunset over Harmony, the artificial glow of the club and diner, shadow falling from the prison cells is particularly effective.

Against this backdrop, the arrival of Luca as the outsider has real impact, deliberately slow, almost evocative of a Western, when the lone figure walks into town and we have time to watch, notice and survey before the action begins again.

The party scene at the end of Act I is a highlight, moving from joyous dance into still vignettes, posed like photographs. In this moment we have time to watch Luca held in different poses, each showing a different side of his relationships: an arm around Lana, then around Angelo, then around them both.

New Adventures dedicates this production to the memory of Jonathan Ollivier, who played Luca prior to his death in 2015. I saw that run just a fortnight before his final show, a performance he was tragically killed hours before giving. He was very much in my thoughts throughout the performance, as I suspect he was for many others both in the auditorium and on stage.

The Car Man remains an outstanding feat of imagination. The sum of its ingredients makes something powerful which is, in the same moment, fiercely modern and yet feels as though it has been in the canon forever.

This production contains strobe lighting, gunshot effects and haze.

Photo credit: Johan Persson