Matthew Bourne’s “The Car Man”; Sarah Kane’s “Cleansed”; Mahler, Dvořák; Weber’s Oberon
I: The Car Man
Dance and theatre are usually seen as separate zones and are reviewed as separate disciplines – but the important choreographers are all original theatre-makers, arresting in their reorganisation of time and space. Some of them – I think of Richard Alston in Britain, and of the late Trisha Brown in America – are so pure-dance that we may scarcely notice what is theatrical about them. The work of Matthew Bourne, however, is intensely theatrical by any standard or definition.
His two-act work The Car Man (2000) may well be the highest-energy of all his creations. The most suspenseful, too: even if you’ve seen it before, the twists of its plot keep taking you by surprise, right up to the conclusion.
Its ensembles are particularly exciting and complex to watch. For one thing, they keep changing shape and number, so that we find we are watching a dance for five couples – no, for seven – no, for six. Nothing is too neat; and each person is highly individualised – one of the couples is same-sex, too – so that the stage abounds with multiple details to observe.
The music is by Bizet, mainly from Carmen, as arranged by Rodion Schedrin (for his one-act Carmen ballet) and then again (for Bourne) by Terry Davies. But the action is set in small-town Midwest America; and the plot – sometimes approaching that of Carmen – is adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice.
As I watched this summer’s two casts, on Thursday 30th July and Friday 31st July, I was impressed by how they differed. Something always to pay attention to in Bourne’s work – not always in a positive way – is his women, who affect different viewers very differently. Several observers haven’t hesitated to apply the word “misogynist” to him. Although I don’t agree, I do find it usefully provocative. In particular, his women tend to use facial expressions much more than his men, often with strikingly open mouths. (Most of The Car Man is played “with the fourth wall down”, with dancers addressing one another rather than the audience, but there are several awkward moments when they suddenly turn their faces out front as if letting us know that they know they are in a show. The women do this more: it is a kind of mirror-consciousness that makes them look more image- or effect-concerned than the men.)
The leading woman here, Lana, does plenty of sultry hand-on-hip behaviour, in a tarty way that struck many as a cliché in stagings of Carmen over fifty years ago. But she’s a different character in the hands of Cordelia Braithwaite and Ashley Shaw. Both play Lana as a fiery woman with plenty of noir developments, but Braithwaite’s Lana seems defined by her tartiness, with her hand-on-hip department connected to the direction of her eyes: she was largely defined by her need to depend on one man or another. Shaw’s Lana was more unpredictable, more unknowable, less obvious in facial expressions, and more multifaceted: she revelled above all in moments of personal freedom – you could see this in her dancing. Sure, she needed to attract men; but she required, too, some degree of personal independence from them.
Many moments in Bourne’s dramatisation make us feel that in Bourne’s Bizet drama it’s Luca, the hunky car mechanic of the title, rather than Lana who fulfils the dramatic function that Carmen has in Bizet’s opera: he’s the one who stands outside conventional society and morality, the one who excitingly unsettles the community. In the current revival, he’s played by Harrison Dowzell (partnering Braithwaite) and Will Bozier (with Shaw) – each excellent. Something impressive about Bozier – a quality that I have admired in a number of Bourne’s best men over the years – is that, although he moves very well, his bearing is not that of a trained dancer. (His dance skill comes as a surprise.) In the work of very few other choreographers would this be a virtue; but it’s part of the naturalness Bourne’s work brings to the stage.
The most original character in the show is Angelo, the apparent weakling among the town’s men and the innocent fall-guy who goes to prison for the murder he didn’t commit. His gay crush on Luca is not the only gay thread in the story, but it’s the first twist we just were not anticipating. Another surprise comes when Angelo becomes the reluctant victim of sexual abuse by his jailer: further twists follow.
In one cast, Leonardo McCorkindale brought a marvellous purity and dance fluency to Angelo, becoming touchingly sympathetic (he’s an exceptional dancer). In another cast, Harry Ondrak-Wright seemed to give the role a yet wider dramatic arc from innocence to bitter disillusionment. I didn’t care, however, for the woebegone passive-aggressive stare he gave the final scenes.
I could make further cavils. (The pseudo-Martha-Graham cabaret dance trio in Act Two, never a highlight, has become entirely inept.) But the production’s sheer narrative sweep and high-voltage energy sweep us along. Though it’s not among my very favourite Bourne works – the final act of his Swan Lake (1995) and his Play without Words (2002) are in my top Bourne drawer – its strange blend of aggressive ebullience and dramatic darkness make it unlike anything else in British dance.
II: Mahler’s First by Heart at the Proms
Two years ago, the National Youth Orchestra gave a superb performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at the Albert Hall Proms. This summer, the same symphony was played by the Aurora Orchestra, “from memory” and with most of the players standing. This too was exciting, but whereas the National Youth, under Alexandre Bloch, really showed the rich findings of close study and preparation, the Aurora Orchestra’s account, conducted by Nicholas Collon, was more recklessly spontaneous.
Many present liked the semi-staged introduction, in which a range of Mahler’s ideas were explored. I enjoyed discovering that the two descending notes of the cuckoo cover a fourth in Mahler’s First whereas they cover only a third in Beethoven’s Choral and in Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals; and I loved learning that the cuckoo’s call actually changes from a third to a fourth after most of the mating season. The whole talk helped us to recognise that Mahler’s symphony, as Pasternak wrote of Pushkin’s poetry, is “full of things”. For me, however, the actor Jack Bardoe’s over-emphatic manner as Mahler was just too eager, too Blue Peter.
Still, the memory of its more adolescent moments was soon swept aside by the wonderful impetus of the Aurora Orchestra. I hope I long remember the way the violins and violas all stood together in one corner of the stage, a company all apparently gathering force and impulse from one another’s proximity.
III: Sarah Kane’s Cleansed at the Almeida
The playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999) had a short but startling career, starting with the 1996 Blasted, and with three of her five premieres occurring at the Royal Court. Her five plays, which made immediate sensations in continental Europe, spearheaded the new wave of “in-yer-face theatre” of that era (starting thirty years ago this autumn); but thirty years on, the expressionist extremism of those plays remains an extreme within British drama – our playwrights have not followed in her tracks.
If I understand Kane’s work – though I am by no means sure that I do – then it concerns the meeting of a bleak classicism of precise but simple language and a bleak, often horrifying, coverage of exceptionally violent conditions and events. The events of Cleansed show us systematic torture of various kinds, with hands, feet, tongues, eyeballs, and genitalia all suffering; and we see lovers and love suffering in consequence of this torture. Yet in the Almeida’s production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, Kane’s language stays thoroughly unremarkable. We see the victims suffer – there are some half-dance-like sequences as bodies writhe in torment – but Kane’s pacing is such that some scenes become strangely dull and flat; and though the characters have pain, none of them develop depth. Some performances here are good – Parth Thakerar was outstanding in the subtleties and complexities of emotion he revealed as Rod – but not all: Leo Bill as Tinker the torturer swallows all too many words.
I keep hoping that we’ll see Kane’s importance emerge; and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent staging of her final 4.48 Psychosis gave meaning to that hope. The Almeida audience for Cleansed was dutifully attentive and eventually enthusiastic, but as if going through the motions.
IV: Zimmermann, Mendelssohn, Dvořák at the Proms, Tuesday 4th August
I have friends who listen to the Proms every evening at home. Still, all of them are well aware – even though not all seats at the Albert Hall are equally good in acoustic terms – that the live experience is something else. The meeting of eye and ear adds immeasurable detail. On Tuesday 4th August, I was nonetheless obliged to listen at home to the concert of Elena Schwarz conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in works by Zimmermann, Mendelssohn, and Dvořák.
The least familiar novelty here was the Fairytale Suiteballet score (1950, Märchen Suite) by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970) – a score to which I have already returned on BBC Sounds. It’s as if Zimmermann had had the same idea as Ravel took for Ma Mère l’Oye; then, where Ravel depicted a compendium of overlapping fairy tales whose picturesque and magical charm become intoxicating, Zimmermann’s tales have less brio but more body, amounting to something more darkly gripping. I wish some choreographer would stage this score – but who?
Schwarz brought marvellous impetus to the Mendelssohn and Dvořák scores – or rather revealed the impetus that both these works marvellously possess. Alina Ibragimova played Mendelssohn’s violin concerto with rapture and exuberance. Even if the Dvořák Seventh Symphony (which had its premiere in London, at the bygone St James Hall ) is less well known than his Ninth, Schwarz showed why it has often been the most admired of all Dvořák’s symphonies. At every moment, you feel Dvořák’s mind moving forward even while he is observing strict symphonic structure. Then, at the end, he builds an extraordinary crisis, and leaves the symphony with a resolution that is far from resolved.
V: Weber’s “Oberon” at the Proms, Thursday 6th August
This is the bicentennial year of Carl Maria Von Weber’s sole English-language opera Oberon. With its crazy scenario (halfway between the Arabian Nights and the Quests of the Round Table) and the silly words of its libretto, this is more often performed in concert than in operatic repertory. Yet it was a huge success when new in London; when I get my Time Machine, I’ll use it to investigate what the 1826 audience so relished.
Yet there is plainly much to relish once you can get past the words and the story. Weber here is anticipating the later Romanticism of both Mendelssohn and Wagner; the delicate dartings of the overture point the way to the Midsummer Night’s Dream, while certain dramatic instrumental proclamations have the epiphanic quality that Wagner would bring to certain leitmotifs.
There are many soliloquies for operatic sopranos that accumulate from despair to hope, but this heroine Reiza’s famous scena “Ocean, thou mighty monster” remains (despite some of its foolish locutions ) a classic of heroic utterance. Jennifer Davis showed admirably how a non-Wagnerian voice can deliver its intensity. In the mezzo role of Fatima, Rachael Wilson – an American making her Proms debut – gave arrestingly gorgeous singing. Nicky Spence and John Findon took the two difficult tenor roles: though Findon had the more impossibly hard challenge as Sir Huon – who has to combine the grand manner with exposed coloratura – he made the stronger impression. Nicky Spence is a theatrical animal in stage manner, but on this occasion was in strenuous voice.
Timothy Knapman had replaced the opera’s spoken dialogue with a spoken narration, in rhyming couplets that encouraged us not to take the story‘s absurdities too seriously. Tamsin Greig spoke this with spaciousness and panache: the purist in me ought to object to some of Knapman’s modern jokes, but I confess they oiled the wheels of this cumbersome plot. Mark Elder conducted with full mastery of the opera’s variety. It is to be hoped this performance leads to a recording.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026