Desires of the dance

This 80-minute set of variations on a theme of seduction and bisexual confusion is no straight drama. And it lays insufficient emphasis on dance to be called a dance-piece.

Matthew Bourne's fascinating Play Without Words might best be described as a mime and jazz music-piece for dancers who seek to discover ways of representing the conscious and unconscious urges of Anthony.

This well-heeled young man, who sexually speaking does not know his own mind, has moved into a Chelsea house. His fiancee, Glenda, leaves him coldish. The housemaid heats him up all over the place and a dominant man-servant, Prentice, looms in Anthony's life as a curiously intimate valet. To convey the enigmatic nature of this class-and-sex war situation and to heighten its impact, Bourne has hit upon the ingenious idea of having each of the four principal characters played by three actors who are dressed in the same costumes.

Each performer displays a slightly different aspect of the character or shows him or her in a different situation. This device helps frame the action in a compelling, dreamy perspective, with sexual ambiguity pervasive. Alan Vincent, the most dynamic of the trio playing Anthony's friend, Speight, propositions both the manservant and Glenda. In an extraordinary scene, at once erotic and disturbing, Scott Ambler, Steve Kirkham and Eddie Nixon as Prentice dress and undress the bespectacled, nerdish Anthony (Sam Archer, Ewan Wardrop and Richard Winsor) treating him as if he were a baby or retarded adult.

The moody dynamism of Terry Davies's jazz score captures the 1960s mood. Lez Brotherston's design crams London tourist landmarks on stage and flags up striptease and peep-show signs as the action moves into Soho and Covent Garden society where flesh is marketed. The direct source of inspiration is Joseph Losey's famous 1960s film, The Servant, from Robin Maugham's novel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, whose quality of veiled menace Bourne's brilliant performers recapture in nonvirtuosic dance and mime.

First seen and admired last year during Trevor Nunn's Transformation season, Play Without Words returns to the theme of suppressed gay desire that haunted Bourne's glorious Swan Lake and The Car Man. On this occasion, though, the second half succumbs to repetitiveness before Anthony is memorably left in dizzying sexual confusion.

Play Without Words