Leave Bizet’s Carmen alone

I’ve always felt uncomfortably ambivalent about the work of Matthew Bourne. Of course, there is no disputing its infectious exuberance or its enormous appeal to a broad public beyond the ballet club. I suppose its eclectic mix of Ashton and MacMillan, camp jokiness, Hollywood movies and Broadway razzmatazz is quirkily unique too – at least sui generis, inasmuch as nobody seems to imitate it with his degree of commercial success. And Bourne’s house designer Lez Brotherston always gets it just right: the shows invariably look great.

Yet there’s also a relentless brashness to them, an absence of psychological nuance and aesthetic restraint. I take a deep breath and try to go with its flow; I end up winded and exhausted. Everything is pitched slam-bang and processed through cliché and parody. The relationship between music and movement is so crude, the choreographic imagination so limited – all too often resorting to the two-to-the-left, two-to-the-right principle of Pan’s People. Yes, it makes for vivid, gutsy theatre. But there’s more to art than that.

My resulting combination of admiration and impatience welled up yet again as I watched this new version of one of Bourne’s biggest hits, The Car Man, expanded to fit the cavern of the Royal Albert Hall. First seen in 2000, it uses Bizet’s Carmen and noirish films such as Ossessione and Rebel Without a Cause as the inspiration for its story of Luca, a drifter who precipitates havoc when he arrives in a small town and proceeds to seduce both Lana, the bored wife of the garagiste Dino, and the wide-eyed ingenuous teenager Angelo.

The spectacle is impressive: the action is brought closer to the audience by a catwalk that runs across the centre of the arena, and Brotherston’s smartly versatile set is complemented by two large screens that project the characters’ facial expressions.