Rupert Christiansen

Leave Bizet’s Carmen alone

Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man at the Royal Albert Hall was an impressive spectacle but enough with the cheesy orchestrations

Passionately committed: Will Bozier as Luca in Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man at the Royal Albert Hall. Credit: Johan Persson 
issue 18 June 2022

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.

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