Dance review: The Car Man

For my roughly annual trip away from Dame Theatre to Baroness Dance, it's one of the Matthew Bourne ballets I've managed to miss on its numerous previous visits to London since its 2000 debut. The Car Man is based on Bizet's opera Carmen, although only musically - the story is apparently more directly inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice. Set in a small town in 1950s America, whose economy seems disproportionately based on the auto repair and cabaret industries for a population of 375, drifter Luca (Will Bozier at tonight's performance) arrives looking for work. He makes quite an impression, seducing both the boss' wife Lana (Eleanor McGrath) and bullied young man Angelo (Harry Ondrak-Wright.) When Lana's husband Dino (Cameron Flynn) catches them, she and Luca kill him and frame Angelo for it.

Like a lot of Bourne's work this is a show about testosterone, both as a destructive force and as a spark for the homoeroticism that's another New Adventures trademark, and the two often blur into each other here.

So the men are as likely to dance with each other as with the women, and there's at least one other same-sex couple established in the story, plus the opening group shower scene that includes a quickFULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!from two of the ensemble. But Luca first gets Angelo's trust by teaching him to box, the latter is physically abused by a prison guard (oddly my second night in a row in Islington watching bloody violence portrayed through the gift of dance) and the whole thing culminates in a town-wide brawl.

As ever I can't comment on the quality or technique of the dance but it's muscular in more ways than one, and maintains that sense of energy and danger, with Lez Brotherston's set giving the dancers lots of precarious levels to traverse. The music is based on an arrangement of Carmen by Rodion Shchedrin, with additional music by orchestrator Terry Davies, and part of the fun of the show is hearing very familiar tunes reworked and put into unlikely new situations - like a barn dance.

On the downside the second half isn't as strong as the first, and the storytelling loses impetus just when it should be building it: I wondered if the big fight scene might have been better off slightly earlier, because once Angelo escapes from prison and kidnaps Lana's sister Rita (Anna-Maria de Freitas) you want to see the central story resolve itself rather than zoom out to the ensemble. But overall it lives up to its publicity as a big sexy dangerous show.

The Car Man by Matthew Bourne, Georges Bizet, Rodion Shchedrin and Terry Davies is booking until the 29th of August at Sadler's Wells; then continuing on tour to Bristol, Newcastle, Southampton, Nottingham, Norwich, Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Eastbourne and Amsterdam.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.