Matthew Bourne talks about his creation of The Car Man

Highly acclaimed choreographer Matthew Bourne is bringing his opera-inspired work The Car Man to Theatre Royal Plymouth next week. Here, he answers a few questions for us about the performance...

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Q: Matthew, why were you first attracted to Bizet’s Carmen?

A: I resisted it for quite a while because there were so many versions of it, both ballet and opera, but I kept listening to the score and felt that it was the right kind of music for my company, New Adventures. I also felt in 2000, when I made the original piece, that it suggested a different kind of movement than we had done before. It was particularly listening to the Shchedrin arrangement (the short 40-minute ballet version using only strings and percussion) which got me really excited and I thought, we've got to do this, we've got to use this music. But to stop myself, and probably everyone else, thinking, “Oh no, not another Carmen’, I thought, well, we'll use the music but we'll tell a different story and that’s what really inspired me and made the whole thing feel like a totally original project. I was also keen to create a “dance thriller’; full of plot twists and suspense. You can’t do that with a story people already know!

Q: How does New Adventures’ The Car Man differ from the original Carmen?

A: Quite a lot but there are parallels with the opera story; there are elements of lust, fate, revenge and murder and all those things that are associated with Carmen. I think the essence of Carmen is there, but we've set it in a different place and time. The Car Man is set in an Italian-American community in a small mid-western American town in the 1960s. Although it's set in the USA there is quite a European feel to the production and although there are some obvious American elements, we've tried to add a gritty kind of realism, associated with Italian, French and Spanish cinema, and to avoid Hollywood glamour.