Plenty of charm and mischief as Bourne finds his identity
Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures
Retrospective dance shows can smack of a choreographer running out of ideas and ransacking their own archives until inspiration next strikes. However, given that dance-theatre marvel Matthew Bourne is currently delighting the nation with The Red Shoes, one can
only admire him for somehow also finding the time to glance back.
Early Adventures sees Bourne resuscitate a clutch of pieces from between 1989 and 1991, ie, around the time he founded his own company. In fact, even then, each work was already a trip down memory lane, a wry look at an inter- and post-war Englishness that in many ways is as comforting as a jar of mint humbugs.
Inspired by Joyce Grenfell’s Nursery School sketches, Watch With Mother is set in (where else?) a gym. This sees the grown-up dancers decked out as school-children, nimbly cavorting around. All hoitytoity partygoers and tireless valets, Town plays out to Elgar, Coward and others, while Country whisks us back to an old-fashioned rustic idyll. Finally comes The Infernal Gallop (Offenbach’s can-can to you and me), set against Lez Brotherston’s offkilter Parisian backdrop. This is France and the French as seen by us Brits, with Piaf, Trenet et al accompanying perky little episodes of insouciant bathing and grand amour à la française.
So far, so frothy, you might think – and yet, there’s no shortage of Bourneian spice along the way. For every Brief Encounter pastiche, there’s also an all-male encounter in a Parisian pissoir – perhaps rather bold for mainstream dance 25 years ago. For all their perky physicality, those Grenfellian escapades have an edge, while the rustic funeral that closes Country reads almost as an elegy for a way of life long since passed.
However, the mood is above all one of easy charm. Every fruitily suggestive tryst is played chiefly for laughs, while that valedictory procession is in fact for a (puppet) hedgehog that’s been poleaxed by a pair of clog-dancing yokels.
Each piece has its highs and lows, and not every passage sticks fast in the memory or affections. But the nine dancers acquit themselves splendidly (especially Mari Kamata). And it’s great fun to see Matthew Bourne, one of dance’s true originals, finding his feet, while hinting at far more substantial treats to come.