Matthew Bourne - Phillips Interview

Bourne Again,
Two-Time Tony Winner Returns With "Theater Stroke Dance"
By Tony Phillips

Michela Meazza, Madelaine Brennan,
Ewan Wardrop, Alan Vincent.
Photo: Richard Termine

Sam Archer and Steve Kirkham
Photo: Richard Termine

Photo: Richard Termine

Matthew Bourne is more cautious than any pharmacist with his triplicate script for Play Without Words. Before dispensing the pitch for his high concept swirl through swinging London--loosely based on Joseph Losey's kinky 1963 upstairs downstairs film The Servant--the director plasters on cautions. Sitting in the Hudson Hotel, fresh into only his second production cycle in New York, perhaps the crafty North Londoner is right to be careful. He's at cunning's peak in a career built on really big ideas. Boldly scuttling Harold Pinter's Servant script, bilingual cacophonies of Terry Davies' frenetic jazz score and his own inimitable movement rise up in its place. But lack of dialogue isn't the masterstroke, rather it's casting major roles--Chelsea sophisticate Anthony, his finance Glenda, their bisexual manservant Prentice--in triplicate so the duplicitous spiral of class and sex explodes with multiplicity.

Here, the ingenious director and choreographer talks not only about the genesis of his Play Without Words, but also his neighborhood Our Gang-style productions of Mary Poppins, the reformation of his fifteen-year-old production company and the birth of his latest project, the Edward Scissorhands Ballet.

Tony Phillips: I've been talking to a lot of people from the UK lately who are bringing their shows to the US and having a difficult time getting them here in tact.

Swan Lake was on Broadway and since then I've done musicals in London. When I've done my own shows, I brought several of them to LA and other places in the States.

I saw The Car Man in LA, but I just assumed that it came to New York.

It didn't, but it was partly to do with 9/11. That was our opening night, actually, in LA, so everything changed at that point for several months. I've done a Cinderella, I've done a Nutcracker which went to California this last Christmas, I did the revival of My Fair Lady with Cameron Mackintosh and we thought that would come to Broadway, but it never did. So this is only the second thing we've managed to get here. But whom were you talking about specifically?

Well, lots of Brits--like Edward Hall and Sarah Brightman--have been having immigration troubles.

Oh really, well Sarah's got enough money to make a trip to London to get her visa.

She certainly does. How did this new production come together?

Well, it's an unusual one for me because it came together in an unusual way. It was done for the National Theater and it was part of an experimental season that Trevor Nunn had done before he left there which was all about devised work and new writing, that was the only stipulation, really. It was for two and a half weeks; each piece was on for a very short run. He said, Would you like to do something? I said, Of course. It's a commission to do something and you don't often get that. I said, should I try and do a play without words as a sort of description rather than a title? And he said, yeah, that'd be interesting, try it. And so I approached it as a play and not as a dance piece. It's a subject and a way of working that I wouldn't have done if I thought it needed to be a commercial piece, which all my other pieces are. Or it needed to run, or it needed to tour, I wouldn't have entered into it this way. So it was a great experience for me, it proved something to myself, I can still get into a room with a group of great people and come up with something in a few weeks and not have to concern myself with if it's a famous title or if the music's well-known or all these things that make it commercially viable.

Was this a necessary step for the reformation of your company?

Nutcracker, which was so different. It said something about what I wanted to do, I suppose, something a little more experimental and soul-searching than a big crowd pleaser family piece like Nutcracker. That is the way I'd like to continue because I don't get pressured into doing one or the other. I don't do the popular pieces because I have to; I do them because I want to. I love them. Sometimes people say to me, Isn't it nice to not have to do that? Well, it is, but I doesn't mean I don't like the other thing. So Play Without Words was a very refreshing piece to do and when we actually got it on, it turned into a very popular piece as well, but the chance to fail really excited me.

And Joseph Losey's film The Servant was an inspiration for you?

Well, yeah, the film The Servant is the main film I use. I saw it when I was very young. I must have seen it when I was twelve or thirteen because I can't remember a time when I didn't know this film. It meant different things to me then than it means now when I see it. The appeal of it is that you don't quite know what's going on all the time, it suggests to you. This was a way of working and it's a way that Losey's best films are very successful at doing. It's this underlying story--like Pinter, as well, who wrote the screenplay--this underlying story or stories going on and for me it's was a new way of storytelling because my natural instinct is to be clear, because it's not got words, I want the audience to get it. I want them to understand, and when they don't get it, I'm thinking how can I make this clearer? With this, it was the big question mark. We thought, well we don't have to explain this. Let the audience think what's going on here. So that I got from Losey and Pinter and I think it's the Losey/Pinter films that are most interesting.

Pinter has such a reputation as an old crank. Did you work with him at all?

Pinter was not involved at all. He didn't come to see it and I'm not sure how aware of it he was, although we were at the National and he had been quite recently working there, so I don't know. I think he would have found it intriguing, actually, because there's an element to his play's where it's the words, actually, that are mundane conversations, really, and it's the underlying story. I felt we could do that with movement as well. Where the actions spoke louder than the words. So for me, he was a playwright that was really interesting to read and to watch more of his work to feed into this piece. I think he would have liked the theatrical idea of the piece, it's not necessarily the films it comes from, but it's the triplicate casting. This is the thing that makes it worth doing on stage, this theatrical idea, rather than just using film episodes. What it does, really, is very intriguing and it gives you some of those options of where the story can go and what the character is thinking. It suggests this could have happened or that could have happened or what happened an hour later or what happened half an hour before and we show them all at the same time. .

So you've got three endings?

I think there are three suggested endings in a way. It goes over into a train of consciousness section, the way it began, in a way, but I didn't want to have specifically one thing with the way it ended up in the very end for the audience as well. And I think that's what they enjoy about the piece, it's this suggestiveness, somehow, this intrigue, they have to make their own mind up as an audience. They have to work at it as well. I have to say one thing to the audience as a warning, People find the first ten-minutes rather difficult, not in terms of what they're looking at--because it's quite beautiful--but in terms of 'Am I suppose to catch all this?' I introduce the world--the how we're going to do it--in the first ten-minutes. You don't need to follow each individual bit. When you need to look at something, I'll make sure you're looking at it.

So much of your work seems drawn from childhood.

People are very interested in what part of me is in the work here, more so than at home. It doesn't come up. It makes me think about that as well. And of course there's a lot of me in the work, but I haven't had a particularly interesting life or upbringing.

Then what was it like?

Very ordinary, working class Cockney East London, there was no theatrical stuff going on in my family, but I was a big film and theater fan before I was a dance fan and that's where my most of my ideas come from, that's where my upbringing is.

Do you remember your first experiences with art?

Psycho and I'm sure The Servant was a film my parents, particularly my mom, liked. She probably thought it was a bit adult for me in certain parts, but they would talk to me about these things and it made me excited about them. Hitchcock films are something I've watched all my life. I always thought I was very lucky to have gotten into dance late. I know everyone thinks it's a disadvantage, but actually for me, as a choreographer, it's always been an advantage. I feel I connect with people a lot better because of that and I'm not from that rarefied world where I'm so dedicated to doing one thing. If you come to make work that way, eventually your subject tends to be dance or movement rather than anything else.

When did you start dancing?

I had my first dance class when I was 22. That's very late for dance. I'd done a few amateur song and dance shows, I was always copying things I'd seen in films, that kind of thing, it wasn't always a career thing.

I read about your neighborhood productions of Mary Poppins.

Yeah, yeah, I did that. I've just done the West End one, but I did that too. I used to go and see movies and then from memory recreate them with kids down the street. They loved it, yeah, but I was always the star.

You've worked with Cameron Mackintosh a lot.

Poppins was the third time I've worked with Cameron Mackintosh. I did Oliver and My Fair Lady, and Cameron co-produced Swan Lake on Broadway.

What was it like working on Mary Poppins now?

It's great; I've had such a ball doing it. It's a dream job for me, really, and I talked to Cameron about it over ten years ago really, but then there were the rights problems with Disney and sorting out that relationship took so long, so I was glad he remembered me when it finally came around again. With Mary Poppins, I was co-director with Richard Eyre and I was in it from the beginning, which was so much better for me. In some ways, just being a choreographer was a bit of a relief for me, but I can't see myself ever doing that again now, just choreographing a show. I always want to have an involvement in directing. I love the co-directing, co-choreographing. I love the sharing of responsibility and the team work, I really enjoy that. But when I'm doing my own pieces, they're my own form of theater language so I feel I'm the only person who really understands that world. The dancers I work with have this shorthand and they understand that world too. I couldn't very easily pair with anyone on that kind of show so A Play Without Words and the other plays that I've done are a product of my company, really, and the other stuff I see as very freelance, drawing another side to what I do. I'm lucky that I can do both, but certainly the musicals do pay more.

So what happened to your original company?

I think what happened to that company is that we experienced enormous changes almost overnight after we made Swan Lake and we were a really small touring, funded company--six or seven dancers, very small--and suddenly we were dealing with West End and international touring, big demand for the work, then Broadway. Then other shows that had enormous expectation and big casts and big orchestras and we were always one step behind so trying to cope and deal with this, and though the success was great on one level, it was very hard to keep everything going on many different levels. It went on--we did it--for some years, but I felt my partner I was working with and the team she'd assembled were getting a little grand after a while and that we could do anything. I felt like I'd like to do the piece under more controlled conditions. I'd like to not produce them without the right people in them. I wanted to be always available to rehearse them and to have my person involved and they seemed really precious and delicate pieces and not the easiest pieces to cast. I just didn't want it to get overblown and so I pulled back from that and said, No more, I'm going to start again and work with partners and producers--I worked with the National Theater and my Nutcracker is produced by ATG, which is a company in Britain--and all I do is have artistic controls over the pieces, but I don't have the pressure of producing so much.

It sounds a bit like a divorce.

People did see it like a divorce because we were known as a partnership pretty much, certainly in business terms, and it was, but it wasn't as if we sat down and said, You can have this and you can have that. What I found was, what it came to was, I actually didn't really own anything. It wasn't done in that kind of straightforward way, splitting up the household and all that. So I had to find a way of coming to terms with that, and actually what's happened to me over the years is that pieces have come back to me. I've now got the rights back to Swan Lake and it's in Japan at the moment. It was back at Christmas in London and it was very successful, more successful than ever, really, which is sort of unbelievable. So things are good at the moment, but for a while it was quite uncomfortable, sad, difficult to deal with, but things have turned out well.

Are all dancers just naïve about the fine print ownership of the dance?

It has been over the years, but some people are wise to it now. I think if you're going to have any success being a commercial company, and we're the only commercial dance company in Britain, you have to keep an eye on the business as well. I don't think I'd be where I am now if I was all about art. I have to play the game a little bit. I have to understand how things work. I also have to not be outrageously ambitious sometimes with what I do because I have to have an eye on making it work. So if I'm sensible about those things as well it'll all work out. .

So you've talked about a bunch of work here. I'm wondering when you sleep?

Highland Fling and also we had Nutcracker out on tour in California. So it's a bit insane, but actually I did manage because Poppins started in July so by the time we got to London it was done, more or less. It worked out very well, but I don't want it to get too much like that.

Why take on something like Nutcracker, there are already so many of them.

It was a commission ten or twelve years ago now at a time that I would have never dreamt about putting on a ballet. I wouldn't have even considered it because I had such a small company, but then this commission came my way and I thought, Yeah, fantastic, it's a fantastic score, it tells a story--my reason for doing it, and the reason for them wanting me to do it--them being an opera company. Actually, they were recreating the way it was originally premiered, with an opera, so they did this 19-minute opera and then The Nutcracker as the second half that was also 19-minutes long, without an interval. And they didn't want another classical version because they thought there were already enough around. They wanted someone who would do something different so they asked me. I was already was being asked to do something different and my reason for doing most things is to tell a story so I found the story in Nutcracker, which isn't actually a really good story, it trails off usually and doesn't end up anywhere, the second half is just about dancing. It seemed like a good challenge for me at the time so I went for it like I went for everything, I wanted it to have a heart to it, I wanted it to honor the music and not mess around with the music at all. These are the main reasons for doing stuff. I was fed up with seeing this story set in a wealthy family. Christmas, you know, it already felt like a fantasy to a lot of kids watching it, so I gave it a darker setting in an orphanage, a Dickensian type orphanage where the kids are having a sad and pathetic Christmas, second hand toys, a little twig of a Christmas tree, two balls, it was bittersweet in a way. Then when you do release into the fantasy, which all Nutcrackers do, you feel it a lot more, you felt like you've broken out of something. The orphans essentially have this riot and break out of the orphanage. I feel it works. I suppose the other thing with a piece like Nutcracker was to try and make it work for genuinely all the family. Family shows have a bad name in some quarters. They're just for kids and parents have to come along, but it is possible to do a piece that appeals on many levels and there's elements in this Nutcracker which will appeal to adults and trendy young people, the men of the family. You know, it's famously moms and their daughters who do dance classes who come to see it and that's about it.

It must be odd as a gay man working with such child-heavy content post-Michael Jackson.

I like to surprise people. I really don't like to shock people. I have no interest in shocking anyone, but I do like to surprise them. But you can't gage individuals' responses and what people get offended by or don't like to see or read something into something else that you never even thought of. You just can't control that. Occasionally, you do get people who do take offense at something, but actually it's very, very rare. For Nutcracker, particularly this last tour in California, the word got out that it was maybe not for kids, and that put some people off and I think it was the way it was written about. The way you judge each other in Sweetie Land--the Land of Sweets--is that you taste each other so there's a lot of licking of people, and that put a few people off, thinking we can't bring the kids to that, but the kids actually love it. It's fun. It's a little bit naughty, a little bit rude, but it's not something you couldn't bring a tiny kid too who wouldn't find it funny.

Are any ballets sacred for you?

I've done the biggest ones, really. I haven't done Sleeping Beauty, but mainly because I can't think of an idea so there's no point in doing it if you haven't got a really good idea. But Swan Lake's the most sort of Holy Grail ballet really, but as I've said, as long as you're honoring the music and your idea is rooted in the piece and what it's really about then I think you're on the right track.

Is there a point in your latest piece where the audience realizes none of the characters are speaking?

I hope that you get to maybe 20 minutes in, where you suddenly realize no one has spoken, but if you haven't really noticed it, then you just sort of just relax. If you're not exactly sure what you've come to see, then it's quite interesting to watch for when people wonder, Well, when are they actually going to say something? Particularly with this title. I don't know whether people think it's real or not. .

What's it like working with your dancers?

For me, and those dancers, it's totally about research and feeding them with images and they have to go off and do there own research as well. And they've all got piles of films they have to watch. An interesting thing about dancers who act is that I can show them other actors and things in films and they won't mind, they're grateful for that help. Whereas I would never do that with a solely trained actor, say, Go and watch Marlon Brando in this film and be a bit like that. They would never go for that, I'm acting, you know? The other interesting element for actor/dancers is that although it's acted, the vast majority of the time they have to be dancers because the whole thing is counted and this is something an actor would find impossibly restricting. You look here on three, you look there on four, you move your foot on five. To all intents and purposes, when you're watching it, it looks natural, but there may be two people doing it at the same time or three or whatever. This is why it's a very unusual piece. They're very strong actors, but there's no way you could get it done by anyone other than a trained dancer who's used to performing in that way.

I never understood the differentiation. Like these people who are always so surprised when an actor can sing. I always feel like, Well what were you expecting them to do? Math problems?

Highland Fling. It's based on La Sylphide, a very famous, old romantic ballet that starts off in a toilet and people still get so uptight about a toilet onstage in a ballet. They're going to see a play and they say, right, tell me a bit more? People have a certain expectation of anything to do with dance that is unlike anything else

Where do you think that comes from?

It's because a lot of dance over the years has been pretty staid, hasn't pushed the boundaries as it might have done, particularly narrative dance, which tends to be ballet, and so the audience that comes to see a well known ballet has a certain expectation. Hopefully you win them over, but there are certain things that are required of dance. It's tradition, I suppose, and if you go against that... This is a good example; I never put a scenario in the program. It's crazy, when you go to see a play, you don't read the synopsis beforehand to find out who's going to die in act three. Or a film, if you're given that on the way in you'd want your money back. Whereas in opera and ballet, people go in, read the story and then watch it. For my pieces, I say, You don't need it. But people say, Well how will I know what's going on? I say, You will! Just relax! !

So other than mounting your show, what are your plans for this visit to New York?

Avenue Q just before I left. I'm seeing Wicked tonight. I looked through all the off-broadway stuff and nothing spoke to me.

There's a revival of Beckett's Happy Days up that you should see.

Normally, I can fill a week, there's just so much to see, but it's the first time I've been here in years where I have Thursday night free and I don't know what I'm going to see. I guess I have to keep my options open. .

And you're so anxious to see Danny because you're working with him?

We've been talking about it for years now. It's going to be a year of firsts for Danny because this is his first concert piece and it's going to be his first ballet I hope later this year. So it's very exciting

So you're calling it a ballet?

I've given up trying to call it something else. People understand what a ballet is. It's a dance theater in the style of the other pieces I've done, but it's not strictly speaking ballet because I'm not a ballet choreographer, but I think for me, most people understand ballet as a narrative, but it's definitely not a musical.

I just want to make sure this is Edward Scissorhands we're talking about here, correct?

Yes, it was originally West End, but it's going to be at Sadler's Wells, which is a dance house. Actually, I think Tim Burton and Caroline Thompson, who wrote the screenplay, originally conceived it as a musical. Most certainly Caroline has got lyrics that she wrote. They decided not to. And then, when the idea came up to do it onstage, I put it to Danny first and then to Tim. I was quite open-minded for it to become a musical. I was quite open-minded to what it would become, but it was them who insisted that they didn't want it to be a musical. They wanted it to be like the other pieces they had seen. They were excited by the prospect of the non-verbal theater aspect as a way of presenting it. So it came from them, really. We've written the scenario for this version, it's quite different from the film. Danny's written some more themes and some more music for it and it's starting to be designed. We hope to go into rehearsal with it in September; we're quite far down the road with it, actually. .

What's it like working at Sadler's Wells?

My company started doing something new at Sadler's Wells, which is we do long runs. We do like 12-week runs for Christmas run and then they try to do a summer run that's also longer. Incredibly, we can sell out 12 weeks of dance, which is amazing. No one has hit on that as the phenomenon that it is. It really is amazing. Most dance stuff can survive for one or two weeks at the most, and even then it doesn't sell out.

Do you ever feel you have to put the brakes on your work becoming too cultish?

We've been touring a lot, so it's become less cultish. It's become more widely popular and a viable alternative as a form of entertainment. Not a lot of people would ordinarily go to dance and I think it encourages them to see other dance. They might not necessarily like the other dance they see because it's probably a bit too adventurous or abstract and you can't win people over completely, but I do think it's an encouraging sign.

So it sounds like your arrangement with Sadler's Wells is a bit deeper than just a presenter.

We're a resident company there now. We have offices there now. We've got a really nice relationship there now. For us, a twelve-week run is a good length we can be very successful with. To try and survive in the West End where the intention is usually to run for longer, is harder. We're commercial, but only up to a point. But if we can do a good run in London and then tour, our productions kind of work. And it's the best kind of audience for us. It's known as a dance house, but also it does a lot of different kind of work. We're bringing a new audience into them and they also bring an audience to us, which is the regular dancegoers, so they're gaining from us. It's a great relationship we've got with that theater.

So did you approach this last piece in particular as a play or a dance piece?

That's the funny thing about it, I went into it as a play, and I would use movement where necessary. Usually. I'm thinking, How can I get more dance into this story? This could be a dance number, this could be a group, this could be a solo, how do I make it dance? With this one, I wasn't concerned with that, and yet, I keep picking up choreography awards for it. It's strange, because it's been accepted as a dance show, but also, it was equally accepted as a theater show because when the Olivier Awards came out for that year, they have a dance category, which has two awards, and they also have all the theater awards and we were deemed to be theater in those awards so we had five nominations whereas if we'd been deemed to be dance, we could have only been up for one. I was nominated for best director of a play. So my whole career has been a saga of what is it? Where does it fit in? They've been discussing it ever since I won the Tony for best director of a musical, but the show wasn't allowed to be deemed a musical, which is really odd.

Do you think it's a good thing?

Swan Lake may not be a musical, but it is musical theater, that's absolutely what it is. There were a lot of discussion over whether it was a revival or not, but that's the first time that music had ever been heard on Broadway, it was a new musical to Tchaikovsky, but I think it was a step too far for a musical. Play Without Words does that too, people aren't quite sure what category to put it in, I think BAM is selling it as theater, or maybe theater stroke dance. I'm not sure. It's in its own right. It's an unusual piece and I'm very proud of it.

Would you ever consider coming back to New York to direct a Broadway musical?

I had have offers to do musicals that I've always turned down for some reason. I would like to, but I'd like to do something more along the lines of Play Without Words where I was commissioned to do a new work only using American actors. I'd love to do that, but musical theater is quite tough. I do it occasionally, but I'm glad I don't have to survive on it alone. It's a hard world. So I tend to always get back to my company where I feel content, but I can push my own boundaries and try and find new things to say. I do feel this is a form of theater that's particularly mine, it's in its own world and I feel there's still a long way to go. There's a lot more to explore. So if someone offered me a play, well, I'd like to, but it excites me less because everyone does that and I'd probably be second rate when I could be doing my own thing so I've never been tempted.