The Car Man Dance in London

Matthew Bourne's choreography piece, The Car Man, returns to the London stage at the Sadler's Wells venue. This performance functions as a dance thriller loosely structured around the recognizable score of Georges Bizet's opera, Carmen. The narrative relocates the original nineteenth-century cigarette manufacturing plant setting into a mid-twentieth-century vehicle garage and dining facility located in the American Midwest

The plot development tracks the local community members whose standard lives and desires are disrupted by the unscheduled arrival of an unfamiliar male traveler. Driven by environmental heat and personal motives, the town characters enter into a sequence of events involving financial greed, physical lust, interpersonal betrayal, and retaliatory revenge. 

The musical arrangement for this production is produced by Terry Davies, utilizing Rodion Shchedrin's Carmen Suite. The creative team includes scenic and costume design by Lez Brotherston, illumination setups by Chris Davey, and acoustic engineering by Paul Groothuis. The performance spans a fixed runtime of 1 hour and 55 minutes, which includes one structural intermission block.