Tag: Matthew Bourne

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The Bourne Imperative

Well, I’m not sure whether I could stomach Lorna Luft and Dallas alumnus Ken Kercheval in a touring production of White Christmas; but Matthew Bourne’s Bizet ballet The Car Man was certainly worth a trip to the splendid Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru (Wales Millennium Centre) in Cardiff Bay. Inspired by James M. Cain’s oft-adapted 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (revived on 24 January 1952 on Hollywood Sound Stage, starring radio stalwart Richard Widmark), The Car Man is set in mid-20th century small town America (the fictional Harmony, pop. 375), The Car Man tells the story of the titular drifter who falls for the accommodating wife of his new boss (a vixen named Lana, after the actress who played her in the 1946 film version). Though easily duped, the cuckold is bound to find out, eventually, and to be less than accepting of the triangular situation.

Unlike his whimsical if choreographically frivolous Edward Scissorhands (my impressions of which I shared previously), Bourne’s earlier Car Man is proper dance theater, with an exceptional performance by Michela Meazza as Lana.

While firmly within the tradition of 19th-century melodrama without resorting to camp, The Car Man bears no resemblance to Carmen. Indeed, the story as told in movement, light, and a generous amount of stage blood is far easier to follow than that of Bizet’s opera or the Prosper Mérimée novella upon which it is based, a plot comedian Ed Wynn insisted on translating for the listening audience of Tallulah Bankhead’s radio variety program The Big Show on 26 November 1950, as opera star Lauritz Melchior struggled to perform Pagliacci: “And as the curtain rises, we see Carmen walking out of the cigarette factory. We know it’s a cigarette factory because there are doctors walking in and out of the building.”

Those medical practitioners, of course, were meant to endorse tobacco rather than treat the workers or assess the risks of smoking.

“Carmen has many admirers,” Wynn continued, “and to each one of them she has given a lock of her hair. Isn’t that beautiful? So, Carmen, or as she is now called by her friends, Baldy, [. . .].”

Not that Mr. Wynn could have possibly prepared me for the theatrical experience of The Car Man. In keeping with his celebrated all-male revision of Swan Lake, the old love triangle has been colored pink; or, rather, it is getting another—an outré—angle, as Bourne tosses a male admirer of Lana’s lover into the bloody mix of lust, jealousy, and murder. Being granted views of a communal shower, a private bedroom, and life behind bars—or wherever else you might expect intimate encounters of the same and opposite sex on a sultry evening, Bourne’s audiences can and should expect the full bodyworks.

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Dancing with Scissors? Bourne Tinkers With Burton at Sadler’s Wells

Well, I have returned from London—just in time to dodge the “poison clouds” that were expected to blanket the city on 12 December after what the Evening Standard proclaimed to be an “apocalyptic” conflagration in Hemel Hempstead. I did notice the black band of smoke on Sunday afternoon, but failed to match either my observations or my persistent respiratory problems (my cough being a New York City import) with the headlines I had read just hours earlier. I don’t know, somehow bold print on a front page always makes news spell something not pertaining or happening to me. What did happen to me that day was a theatrical experience that, while not quite a blot on the sunny skies of my holiday disposition, left me colder than the wet ashes of an extinguished winter blaze.

I am referring to Matthew Bourne’s production of Edward Scissorhands, the quirky fairy tale created for the screen by Tim Burton and scored by Danny Elfman back in 1990. Burton’s motion pictures are distinguished by a peculiar tension of aesthetics, a confrontation of Post-Modern and Victorian sensibilities, of the queer and sentimental, that conjures up the bathos of a melancholy drunkard slipping in and out of consciousness at an anything goes Halloween bash. The Penguin in the bleak cityscape of Batman Returns comes to mind; or the lonely giant of Big Fish. Sometimes this aesthetic exchange feels rather forced and irksomely disingenuous.

The opening scenes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a movie-qua-computer game about as charming and magical as a dead rabbit pulled out of a plastic top hat, seem as authentic in their winter-of-our-discontentedness as the patched-up seconds of a third-rate Oliver!. With the sweet-and-sour confectionery that is Edward Scissorhands, on the other, finger-licking good hand, Burton got it just about right.

I considered myself both tickled and stirred. Here, the dark scenes contrast with and accentuate the bright in such poignant counterpoint, it is like watching an energetic MTV-age cut of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Unfortunately, Bourne did not manage to infuse his stage version with the same bathos.

Whimsical scenery and a general busyness of dancers jogging about in costumes apparently on loan from a touring company of Hairspray are violently yoked with more or less static scenes depicting Edward in quiet despair. I could have told Bourne that making Edward both move and moving would prove an impossible assignment: you simply can’t dance with scissors.

Edward cuts a dashing figure, all right, but it’s the topiary. At one point, this good twin of Freddy Krueger sheds the shears to take his limbs for a spin; but that only underscores the weaknesses of Bourne’s less than cutting edge production. It would be less painful to watch a clipped wings edition of Swan Lake, the resplendent ballet spectacular that had me in tears at Sadler’s Wells the previous year.

To borrow from an old Saturday Night Live sketch, the modern dance theatre version of Edward Scissorhands at Sadler’s Wells is neither modern, nor dance, nor theater…. Now talk amongst yourselves.