As the chant of dancers’ footsteps squeaks and pads across the stage, the grunt of chests, whip of breaths, and flick of limbs animates Sadler’s Wells with the sounds of Matthew Bourne’s new run of The Car Man.
Between the glimmering hum of small-town Americana, the slapstick of men in gangs, and the blood, the sweat, and the oil that suffuses the air, the acclaimed choreographer’s interpolation of Carmen, his reworking of the opera’s limbs, is an immense shock of colour and sex. It would be impossible to separate any of its themes from the dance’s love of bodies, how they can be used, and the enigmatic ways that the boiling emotions of a parched summer can be rendered through movement. Bodies are stretched, bodies collapse, and bodies are drawn together. Accordingly, the performance follows a love affair, a murder, and a brutal change that many figures impress upon one of their own, perhaps inevitably. In every case, it’s the shape of the human being and what contains them that dictates how they will move and the paths they will draw across the stage.
Though the dancers shout, bark, roar in sudden moments of fury or whiplash humour, the great love affairs and the tumult therein remain silent. The treat of Bourne’s work is the quiet, shared between the performers and the audience, that holds the drama conjured up by New Adventures’ many hands and offers it as a rare and enclosed opportunity to watch human beings as a documentarian might have found them, in the midst of all their gritty loves and brawling furies. Had they spoken, at any point if the dancers took pause and shed their grunts for monologues or conversation, the tremulous effect of the performance would be lost. Instead, The Car Man is presented as just that: the name of a species, a type that perhaps can be found in every corner of the world, every workshop, bar, or sweat-drenched street, that speaks not to a particular man but the kind within each of us that can be drawn out at a breath, a jolt of the limbs, or momentary look.
The audience receives The Car Man’s drama as universal, particularly because it does so much without speech as we know it. The humour is infectious, but like the dancers we aren’t permitted to more than an outburst, or perhaps a gasp at the violence in the later acts. This draws us together, and if there was an agony for speech it would be found only in how riveted the audience becomes to their seats, and how angrily, mournfully, or in excess of joy might the performance lift and glide throughout the setting, hum and slam on the car windows or the shutters of Dino’s Diner, and the thud of bodies hitting a bloody and beloved stage. Matthew Bourne conjures all with the extraordinary talents of Eleanor McGrath, Will Bozier, Anna-Maria De Freitas, Harry Ondrak-Wright, and Cameron Flynn, to name but a precious few.
Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures The Car Man, 11th – 29th August 2026 Sadler’s Wells
All photos Johan-Persson
