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- guardian.co.uk, Friday September 15 2000 00.00 BST
After three months on the road, Adventures in Motion Pictures' latest show, The Car Man, has arrived in London, playing at the theatre that from 2002 will be its resident base.
Last night, as the curtain opened on the production's arrestingly sleazy opening scene, it was clear that the company have found a good home. The Old Vic may offer more cramped conditions than, for instance, Sadler's Wells, but it has a slightly seedy intimacy, a lineage of lively theatrical ghosts that will serve the company well.
AMP are not a ballet company who insist on a grand setting, or a modernist dance group who look best in a plain frame. They are a uniquely motley troupe of dance actors whose inventive, sometimes shockingly direct body language is famous for getting under the skin of the characters they portray and whose effects become more vivid the closer they are seen.
Certainly in The Car Man the characters' skins are visibly crawling with sweat, lust and tension. In this reimagining of Bizet's Carmen, 19th-century Spain has been relocated to mid-20th-century America; the cigarette factory has become a greasy garage-diner and the original story of cuckoldry, murder and lust has been notched up several gears. Replacing the gypsy heroine are a pair of lawlessly erotic lovers, a charismatic drifter called Luca and the siren wife of the elderly garage owner, and as in AMP's cult hit Swan Lake the plot is complicated by several twists of gender and sexual orientation.
Also part of the mix are the thriller conventions of film noir and the intransigent Fates of Greek tragedy, but what is impressive is not only the controlled tension of director Matthew Bourne's storytelling but the close-up detail of his characterisation.
The disintegration of Angelo, the story's gentle victim, from fastidious loner to flayed psycho is riveting, particularly as played by the excellent Will Kemp, while Luca (Alan Vincent) is an intriguingly unglossy hero, who has the aura of a dangerous past. In their duets the interplay of violence and desire becomes so combustible you flinch from the heat
There are still problems with the show that the touring period has not ironed out, notably that the women's choreography does not equal the men's in complexity and glamour. But in other areas the timing seems tighter and the choreography finessed. With Lez Brotherston's set defining a brilliantly louche and period atmosphere, The Car Man drives with an urgency that at moments has our nerves and hearts at full stretch.
Until December 9. Box office: 020-7369 1762.
This review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
