Quotes of the Day

Matthew Bourne is the world's most popular living dance maker. Every night of the year, in some twilit city, the curtain goes up on one of his shows. On his tempestuous, mostly male Swan Lake, the longest-running dance production in London's history and a triple Tony Award winner on Broadway. On The Car Man, his steamy spot-welding of Carmen and The Postman Always Rings Twice. On his bittersweet Nutcracker or his funny, touching Edward Scissorhands.

In little more than a decade, Bourne, 48, and his London-based production company New Adventures, have redrawn the international theatrical landscape, attracting huge new audiences to their inventive and emotionally charged shows. On Aug. 22, at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, they launch Dorian Gray, a tale of modern celebrity meltdown based on Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. "It's very dark," says Richard Winsor, who dances the title role. "The book holds things back — but we're not holding anything back. Sexually, we're going further than we've ever gone."

Wilde's novel, which has a strong homoerotic subtext, tells of a handsome young man-about-town in Victorian London who, as the years pass, never seems to look any older, despite living a debauched and ultimately murderous life. Up in a locked attic, however, his portrait grows increasingly hideous, as each of his crimes leaves its mark. For several years, Bourne turned the story over in his mind. One of the elements that fascinated him was its treatment of male beauty. "You have it, and then you lose it," he says, recalling his own youth as a dancer in London. "I identify with that from my early clubbing days. The power that you felt walking in — like you ruled the world!" The obvious flaw of the book, as Bourne saw it, was its lack of sympathetic characters. But somehow he kept returning to it. "Perhaps this cautionary tale — this Rake's Progress — could tell us something about the world we live in."

The Dorian Gray idea gained impetus when Bourne read Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories and learned that Wilde's novel (which Booker describes as a "black fairy tale") headed the list of classic tragedies. And then there was the accidental death earlier this year of the actor Heath Ledger. "You have this beautiful, talented being dropped into another world — Hollywood — where everyone wants to get in with you," says Bourne. "Would he have died if he'd stayed in 
 Australia, I wonder, or was he a victim of modern celebrity?"

It was the notion of an ordinary person trapped in the spotlight, and the destructive changes this wrought on his psyche that finally unlocked the story for Bourne. His Dorian would be a contemporary young man — the It Boy — who is discovered by a media power broker and transformed into a cultural icon, shedding his humanity along the way. The homosexuality hinted at in the novel would be explicit, and it would be fading billboards, not a painting in the attic, that would serve as a metaphor for the damage to Dorian's soul.

Risky Moves
At a rehearsal studio above Sadler's Wells Theatre in London, Winsor — who also played the lead in Edward Scissorhands — is running through a series of macabre duets with his partners and victims. The music, by British composer Terry Davies, a long-time Bourne collaborator, is contemporary club scene with a sinister edge. "The show's very fast-paced," says Winsor, who prepared for the role by watching films like Peeping Tom, Matador and American Psycho. "We're making him much more psychopathic than in the book. He spirals completely out of control."

While acknowledging the riskiness of Dorian Gray's subject matter, Bourne and his people are cautiously upbeat about its future. The show has been financed almost entirely by the British venues where it will tour after its Edinburgh opening; in return for investing, they will receive a guaranteed share of box office. Another $300,000 or so has been provided by Arts Council England (a publicly funded body), but no "angels" have been tapped for an investment, so the production will not start in debt. "We're very light on our feet in that way," says Robert Noble, New Adventures' managing director. In Edinburgh, Dorian Gray will be watched by representatives of prestigious venues in Russia, Japan and the U.S., including New York City's Brooklyn Academy of Music. Without a step having been danced, a U.S. tour is provisionally penciled in for autumn 2009.

To get some idea of the beanstalk-like progress of a Bourne show, consider Edward Scissorhands, which opened in London in November 2005. To bring Tim Burton's gothic coming-of-age film to the stage, New Adventures raised $2 million from investors, and Arts Council England put in a further $780,000. Scissorhands played British venues until the autumn of 2006, then took off for Korea, Japan and the U.S., where it toured until spring 2007. In May of this year, a revived version of the show traveled to Australia, launching a national tour at the Sydney Opera House. The company returns to Britain for Christmas 2008, then begins a European tour in the spring of 2009. By the end of that tour the piece will have racked up almost 500 performances, and requests to stage it continue to pour in from theater managers around the world. So far, the original investors have recouped their investment and made a 12% profit — "Better, just, than a high-interest account," says Noble.

Bourne dates the beginning of his international career to an evening in 1997, when Gordon Davidson, founding artistic director of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, went to see a London production of Swan Lake, with its cast of virile, threatening male swans. "I was amazed by what he'd done," recalls Davidson, who retired in 2005. "I said to myself, we have to do it — somehow." He brought the piece over to L.A.'s 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theater, whose audience was more used to touring Broadway shows than experimental dance. But when Davidson wrote to all his subscribers telling them: "Trust me on this one!" they came. "And after that, we took New York by storm."

Bourne's success, Davidson says, is born of his genius as a storyteller. "Pieces like Swan Lake are so artistically provocative, in the way you're given a chance to look at a work of art with fresh eyes." For Miyako Kanamori, an executive director of HoriPro, a Tokyo-based entertainment company that has presented Bourne's work in Japan, the appeal lies in the universality of his themes. Expressing human feelings through movement is a feature of traditional Japanese Noh plays, and familiarity with Kabuki drama, in which female parts are played by male actors, has made Bourne's Swan Lake instantly comprehensible to Japanese audiences. In addition, says Kanamori, there's "the uniqueness of his ideas. For instance, the huge cake set in Nutcracker, and the dancing hedges in Edward Scissorhands. Cuteness and decadence exist together, which suits Japanese people's taste."

Beyond Words
In July 2009, Dorian Gray will head to Moscow's Mossovet Theater as part of the eighth Chekhov International Theater Festival. The seventh festival, in 2007, hosted Bourne's Swan Lake; the sixth, in 2005, featured his Play Without Words. "You can't imagine how popular Matthew is," says Galina Kolosova, coordinator of the festival. Play Without Words, which won an Olivier award following its run at London's National Theatre in 2003, is an adaptation of Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant. 
 A witty, psychosexual drama set in an upper-class London household, it features several dancers in each of the lead roles — a daring piece of staging that captivated Russian audiences. Marina Zayonts of the Moscow magazine Itogi remembers that even before Bourne arrived, she and other theater critics were passing around dvds of his work. What fascinated them was Bourne's "ability to break the generally accepted stereotypes," she says. "To us, this seemed to be an unheard-of courage."

If Bourne's shows speak to audiences all over the world, it's because he himself has such an acute comprehension of his medium. As a student in the early 1980s he was a near-obsessive balletomane, dissecting works by classical choreographers like Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan to work out how they established what he calls "that emotional mainline." But he also has an encyclopedic knowledge of film, and of how to apply its visual language in his own work. Speech, he believes, can often get in the way: "You feel things more deeply if there are no words." Go too far in the other direction, however — into what Bourne calls "dance," with audible quotation marks — and people disengage. Bourne's productions combine a precise middle course with translucent storytelling, leaving his audiences free to make the characters' emotional journey their own.

The effect is potent and compelling. Back in Moscow, where she is preparing to travel to Edinburgh for the Dorian Gray premiere, Kolosova describes the reaction of the 91-year-old former Bolshoi ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya to Bourne's Swan Lake. Too frail to make it backstage from her box, the legendary People's Artist of the U.S.S.R. asked for a message to be sent to Bourne. "She wanted to tell him that this was the future," Kolosova recalls. "That this was the way forward."

• Luke Jennings
• Matthew Bourne turns Dorian Gray into a tale about the perils of fame and beauty