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.