The_Spectator_April_15_2017

BOOKS & ARTS

Dance

First Bourne

Louise Levene

Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures
Sadler’s Wells

‘Modern’ dance was no laughing matter
in 1987. Harold King, director of the now-
defunct London City Ballet, cattily typi-
fied it as ‘lesbians in bovver boots playing
a mouth organ and banging a drum on the
banks of the Thames’. Camp, funny and
unashamedly ‘accessible’, even Matthew
Bourne’s earliest efforts were a far cry from
the earnest output of his more contempo-
rary contemporaries as his 30th anniversary
retrospective, Early Adventures, reminds us.
Bourne’s early pieces were conceived
on a modest scale with taped music and
only a handful of dancers, but the works in
the current triple bill show that his gift for
creating character and narrative was evi-
dent from the start. The young man from
Walthamstow had spent his stage-struck
youth watching plays, musicals, ballets and
vintage movies with a magpie eye, saving
up gestures and steps that would be refash-
ioned into his work.
He came unusually late to formal dance

JOHAN PERSSON

This is England: Paris Fitzpatrick and Daniel Collins in ‘Town and Country’ from ‘Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures’

training, signing up for a BA at London’s

Laban Centre at the age of 22. The Laban

was never intended as a technical hothouse

(the Times’s John Percival always privately

referred to it as ‘the Banal Centre’) but it

taught Bourne how to structure his ideas

and fed his passion for dance history.

The programme is packed with balletic

and cinematic in-jokes but the most striking

thing about the triple bill is its extraordinary,

warm-beer-and-bicycles take on all things

English. ‘Watch With Mother’ and ‘Town

and Country’ feature lashings of Eric Coates

and Percy Grainger, riding breeches, yokel

smocks and a mile of grey flannel. Even

the larky ‘Infernal Galop’, made in 1989 to

mark the bicentenary of the French Revolu-

tion, shows the French through English eyes

with a full house of Gallic clichés (berets,

matelots, pissoirs) and a garlicky playlist of

Trenet, Piaf and Offenbach.

‘Watch With Mother’ (1991) is prob-

ably the weakest piece of the evening but

the cast of overgrown children act out the

sketches with galumphing glee — nothing so

creepy and revealing as grown-ups in shorts

The most striking thing is Bourne’s

extraordinary warm-beer-and bicycles

take on all things English

and gymslips. Bourne’s go-to family of stock

characters — the frump, the wimp, the bully

— can all be glimpsed in embryo as they

lumber through Joyce Grenfell’s glorious

Music and Movement pastiche.

Sir Matthew’s fame (and fortune) was

made by his full-evening dance dramas. His

1995 Swan Lake, with its unhappy modern

Prince and its scary skein of male swans,

tapped into an unsuspected appetite for

dance theatre. This international hit was fol-

lowed by versions of Cinderella, Carmen,

Edward Scissorhands and last winter’s Red

Shoes, but until 1992, when he made his first

narrative piece, a version of The Nutcrack-

er, he favoured a revue-like format. This can

render works like ‘Town and Country’ bitty

and prolix but it also guarantees plenty of

emotional and stylistic variety.

A lifelong affection for the ballets of

Frederick Ashton sets the tone for the

rural idyll of ‘Town and Country’. It is set

to Percy Grainger and packed with bare-

faced borrowings from La Fille mal gardée

(ribbons and clog dance) and Façade (the

saucy cow’s udder motif). Bourne shares

Ashton’s flair for character comedy but

also has his gift for sudden cloudy spells

of serious emotion. These rapid chang-

es of tone are made possible by the cast’s

tragicomic timing and by nifty, economical

transformations. In ‘Town’, a railway clock