The Dancing Mechanic

A review of Matthew Bourne’s ‘The Car Man’

Sadler’s Wells, Islington.

YOU HAVE DONE THIS TOO. You’ve gone to the wrong platform and caught the opposite train, and been taken straight back to your original destination. You’ve found out about an exam hours before you have to sit it, scrambling to learn the answers from your peers. You’ve gotten the dress code for an important event wrong. You, too, have been unprepared.

Going into Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man, a contemporary ballet adaptation of Bizet’s classic Spanish opera Carmen at Sadler’s Wells, I was unprepared. I hadn’t heard of the original opera, and I hadn’t looked at the details of Bourne’s show before booking the tickets, so it dawned on me only after the first musical number, ten or so minutes in, that what I was watching was going to be a story told without words.

Internally I cursed. I’ve never actually gone to see a ballet, but I have been to the opera once before, to see Verdi’s Rigoletto. That had been interesting, but quite a thing to get through, the kind of show you remind yourself is timeless, impressive Art in order to stifle a yawn. I had liked it but my pretensions about opera had felt confirmed: refined, subtle, elegant but unexciting. The Car Man did a lot to undo my presuppositions, to expose my naivety.

At its core, The Car Man is a retelling of the classic gothic tale; the esoteric intruder, the travelling man, inserting himself into an otherwise tranquil village and smashing things up, turning the denizens against each other and taking his smoke-shrouded leave. The show opens in Dino’s garage and diner, with a gangly group of horny mechanics jeering at Lana, Dino’s salacious wife. Into the garage comes Luca, the travelling man, who instantly commands the attention and favour of both Lana and Angelo, the man who is courting Lana’s sister, Rita. From here unfolds a vicious, erotic conglomeration of sex, loyalty, and murder, as Lana and Luca frame Angelo for their killing of Dino, and flee Harmony (population 356, now 353).

The more cerebral and psychedelic second act swaps the car shop for the glitzy bar, and charts the consequences of this homicide-escape, of Luca’s guilty conscience and Lana’s wandering eye. Ultimately, Angelo - fresh from his own murderous prison escape - returns to battle with Luca and exact his revenge on Lana. Before he’s able to, Lana, seeing the error in her ways and the pathological evils of the man she ran away with, shoots Luca, ridding Harmony of his torturous, tempting presence. The Car Man is at once an interrogation of masculinity, a spectacle of eroticism, and a Hamletian revenge story.

Bourne’s adaptation trades Bizet’s cigarette factory for a rowdy mechanic’s workshop. This setting provides the necessary overtone of masculinity which allows the workmen to explore their uncompromising sexual urges, in a show where men and women kiss and fondle without discrimination. Between the oily setting and the rugged workwear costumes, a glorious paradox of sexual androgyny and toxic masculinity unfurls, and the players manage to draw an impossible line between their boisterous, brash jeering and whooping, and their elegant, refined ballet movements. Overworked masculinity and sexual liberality go hand in hand in Bourne’s 50s-style interpretation, owed in large part to the traditionally masculinised setting.

Luca and Lana are drawn to each other because of their willingness to defy traditional gender roles, in a context where they seem impossibly celebrated. The romance launches as they both, for a moment, stand performing their traditional roles - he polishing the car, she proving some dough. Luca discards his rag and advances on Lana, but it’s not until he sweeps her dough aside - freeing her of her gendered containment - that their spark ignites. From here we come to see Luca as the standard model of masculinity in an over-masculinised space, the man in a car shop full of boys (a car shop which, prior to Luca’s arrival, displayed a ‘MAN WANTED’ sign).

It is the pathology of Angelo and his lust for Luca which is the central construct of the show. Initially framed for the murder of Dino, Angelo then actually kills a guard to engender his prison escape - he takes on the identity with which he is branded, and his behaviour throughout the second act exemplifies this character-assumption. He is violent towards Rita, and openly aggressive in his sexual advances towards Luca, even as they fight to the death (Luca having trained Angelo to fight early in Act One, a didactic act which had evidently ameliorated Angelo’s feelings towards him). He flaunts his gun, seemingly intent on blowing his girlfriend’s brains out, but at the moment of death time and time again he chooses love, if not for her then for Luca, the travelling man.

The choreography and composition of the play was faultless. The pacing oscillated: the first act blew by, save for a slightly lagging third scene dominated by lilting woodwind and long, romantic movements. The plot really swelled, or came into establishment, in the final scene, and all that came before could be accused of being overly establishing and thematic, almost to a fault. And then a dreamy, neurotic second act completely overhauled the first, replacing the brashness of the car shop with the sensitive and subtlety of a liminal cocktail bar.

The Car Man is an interrogation of masculinity and fidelity. It is also an exercise in futility, in allowing misfortune and mischief to enter our hearts and realising much too late that it must be expelled. It is a proof of what happens when that expulsion happens when it is all already said and done. The Car Man is a gothic classic and it is also, in a sense, the tale of Adam and Eve. It is a highly stylised, highly temporal reformation of a classic, pedagogical, ever-relevant tale. Prepare yourself.