Dance
Matthew Bourne's The Car Man
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
FIVE STARS
Programmes and posters tag this piece of dance-theatre as "Bizet's Carmen re-imagined". "Oh, wow!" you think, after two hours of sex-driven, steamy-gyrating cut and thrust: Matthew Bourne has a very ... shall we say, agile imagination. He also has the measure of what makes a story riveting: not just reckless desires, lust, murder and a twist of deadly comeuppance, but characters we care about.
In The Car Man, where fatal attractions and tragic rivalries are transposed from Bizet's 19th-century Spain to a dust-bowl town in 1960s America, the couple who pull at our heartstrings most are Angelo (Liam Mower) and Rita (Kate Lyons). Vulnerable innocents both, in a community of swaggering studs and compliant women, their lives are brutally impacted by the wrecking ball that is Luca and Lana's lust.
Luca (a charismatic, athletic Jonny Ollivier) is the drifter with an opportunistic sex drive who rolls into town and into bed with Lana (Zizi Strallen) who's already married to a distinctly unengaging garage owner. Lana is a honey-pot on legs. Legs that flash and tease with all kinds of come-ons - Strallen really makes her sizzle, even in a demure sun-dress and pinny.
You know, of course, that Harmony - the wry name of the town, population 375 - is like a pressure cooker waiting to blow. Bourne's dancers make you feel the maddening heat of a sweltering summer, the heat of drink-fuelled rutting, the heat of boredom that sees the weak and tender - Angelo and Rita - picked on and brutalised. Terry Davies's score re-imagines Bizet with compelling energy, Bourne's graphically expressive choreography re-imagines passion noir with dramatic flair.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article