FOR someone courted by Cameron Mackintosh, Nicholas Hytner and the Disney corporation, Matthew Bourne is surprisingly unassuming. But even he is forced to accept a superlative when it’s offered.
“I will accept that I’m the most successful choreographer in Britain because it is fact,” he says simply. “In the sense that I know it to be true because of the number of people who come to my shows, the length of runs and the amount of touring we’ve done recently to make our audiences grow.
“But I never get complacent; I’m always ready for a failure. I worry about everything; I worried a lot about Swan Lake.” This is “the world’s longest-running ballet production”, the work everyone associates with Bourne. The stylish satire with the male swans and the Prince Charles hero, the one that conquered the West End and Broadway. Its recent tenth-anniversary revival which had a sensational run at Sadler’s Wells, was a critical and box-office triumph.
So, too, is Mary Poppins, which Bourne co-directed (with Richard Eyre) and co-choreographed (with Stephen Mear); it will be going to Broadway next year. Meantime, there have been revivals of his playful Nutcracker and his seductive Olivier Award winner, Play Without Words. If all goes well, 2005 will end with Bourne’s new dance adaptation of Tim Burton’s 1990 cult film Edward Scissorhands.
Bourne, now 45, loves movies. An East London boy, he grew up in Walthamstow watching MGM musicals on the telly, and his favourite form of relaxation is watching old films — he has hundreds of them at home. Pride of place in his office at Sadler’s Wells is a poster for Edward Scissorhands, poor Johnny Depp hugging Winona Ryder while trying desperately not to wound her with his terrifying scissor hands. Dance posters and photographs, mementoes of Bourne’s extraordinary career, line the other walls: Adam Cooper, suggestively wrapped around a swan; Scott Ambler, cheeky in a kilt.
It’s this latter production that is filling Bourne’s working day. He’s getting Highland Fling, his sophisticated 1994 parody of La Sylphide, ready for a 13-week British tour that starts on February 12. In Bourne’s waggish version, set in Glasgow, James is an unemployed welder whose idea of a good night out is to pop pills and pass out in the lavatory at the Highland Horse social club disco. The nasty sylph who lures him away from his beloved looks as if she’s just escaped from rehab. Bourne has expanded Highland Fling and rechoreographed it, but the concept is “virtually exactly the same. That’s the thing that usually holds up with my work, the concept.”
In the beginning that was the criticism he faced, that his witty and clever stagings were more about concept than choreography, that the steps were less important than the ideas behind them. Bourne, who also choreographed Oliver!, My Fair Lady and South Pacific, admits he’s closer to theatre than dance, partly because he came to dance so late (he started training at 22) and partly because theatre was his first love.
“I am much more a man of the theatre and I’ve naturally brought my interests in theatre and film into my dance,” he says. “But my medium is dance; it’s storytelling without words and that’s the way my form of theatre is expressed.”
His acceptance by the dance community wasn’t always a given (one imagines more than a little jealousy at his commercial success). In the early days he felt that while the ballet world was welcoming, his talent to amuse was “sniffed at in the contemporary world”. But that’s no longer the case. “A few years ago, when Nutcracker and Play Without Words opened, when New Adventures was launched, it felt like a turning point, that my work was being accepted for what it was.” This month he won a Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Play Without Words.
Bourne launched his current company, New Adventures, in 2002, after his previous troupe, Adventures in Motion Pictures, was liquidated following a rift between Bourne and his management. “It was getting a bit out of hand, a bit grand. I felt the company and the artistic work wasn’t coming first any more; it was about branding and image. There were seasons I had nothing to do with; and there was a loss of quality-control in the shows.” Now, with his new troupe, Bourne enjoys total artistic approval.
With revivals of The Nutcracker, Play Without Words, Swan Lake and Highland Fling he is building up a repertoire. “These works are very precious to me and I don’t want to lose them. I don’t feel I’ve got dozens of pieces in me that are going to come out over the years. I want to hang on to the ones I’ve got. Also, I’m trying to show the Arts Council that this is a company that has staying power. Funding is always difficult but I’d love to get to a point where the dancers wouldn’t have to be unemployed between shows.”
He isn’t keen to work with big ballet companies, but he is interested in a BBC commission for a full-length dance piece next year, perhaps Romeo and Juliet. “The chance to create for the screen properly — not something that’s been a stage show — would be really interesting. It’s an offer you can’t refuse.”
The National Theatre, too, beckons. “Nick Hytner wants me to do something next year, but he’s pushing me towards darker ideas, maybe something adapted from a novel. I think he’s interested for me to have the chance to do something that’s not instantly popular. Which is what the National gives you a chance to do — to experiment. I would never have done Play Without Words without the National.”
Before then it’s Edward Scissorhands. Tim Burton has given Bourne’s dance version his blessing. “He has been a big fan of the company for many years and he wanted the stage version of his film to be like my shows. He didn’t want it to be a musical.”
So why see it as a dance? “It’s a sort of modern-day fairy story which lends itself to those universal themes that dance does very well. It has clearly defined characters who are not too complex, and a central love story which can never be. And the idea that it’s about someone who can’t touch — that’s such a physical idea.” Surely that lack of contact is an anathema to an art form that expresses itself through the body? “Well, I’ve got an idea there, you see. What dance also does very well is that it can take you into the imagination. It does fantasy well. It does visions and thoughts well. So imagine a scenario where Edward imagines himself with real hands, dancing with the heroine Kim.
“There are all sorts of elements we have that don’t feature in the film, and I’m not just talking about dancing topiary. For example, there’s a scene in the film where Edward is in Kim’s bedroom and he sees her through her photographs on the walls. So that leads you into bringing these images of the different Kims alive: the ballet-dancing Kim; the athletic Kim. You can turn that into something that’s in his mind. This you can do brilliantly in theatre; and in dance you can do it even better.”
- Highland Fling opens at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley (0870 0606620), on Feb 12; at Sadler’s Wells, EC1 (0870 7377737), on March 1
