The Bourne Supremacy

Maybe that's not so perverse after all, because his own dark fantasies of thwarted romance fuel a fire that has enraptured, as one media fan raved, 'a huge and diverse audience that will follow him to hell and back'. To keep them happy, Bourne mounts productions such as The Car Man and his Swan Lake that do indeed often take us to a steamy underworld (with the obvious exception of Mary Poppins, one of his recent smashes). Not so much steam this Christmas, however, when his dreamy take on Edward Scissorhands returns to Sadler's Wells, at the same time as Cameron Mackintosh's new production of Oliver!, which Bourne has co-directed, opens in Drury Lane.

He's been something of a multiple threat since his all-male production of Swan Lake set feathers flying in 1995. It's been such a global success that there are probably leagues of young balletomanes who have no idea that the swanswere originally fragile ballerinas. Every night of the year, there's a Bourne production playing somewhere in the world. His company New Adventures gives regular employment to anywhere between 70 and 100 dancers a year. And in the wake of the Bourne juggernaut, the whole world seems to have gone dance-crazy. Incidentally, he loves Strictly Come Dancing. 'People can see what it feels like to dance. You watch gawky awkward people become quite sexy through movement, and you can feel their enormous satisfaction and pleasure through doing it. It's something you want to be part of.'

Bourne, 48, agrees that dance was just waiting to be taken and shaken - all that bottled-up sex and physicality and obsessiveness - though he denies it was ever his intention to be the iconoclastic Aladdin who released the genie. 'I think I just went in and did what I do. I wanted to tell a story as best I could. But in the very small world of dance - which it is in terms of everything else in the arts - I think Swan Lake did shake things up a bit. When it went into the West End in 1995 and was getting big audiences, there was a lot of talk among dance-company directors about what sort of productions they needed to be doing to get people in. Advertising changed quite a lot. It was reaching out to people the way film posters do. You put a bit of nudity on a poster, you sell much more.'

The intersection of such showmanship and a 'high' art form like dance makes me think of Diaghilev, the man who turned the Ballets Russes into the pop cultural sensation of the early 20th century. 'I do have that sort of spirit, I suppose,' Bourne says tentatively, 'but I like to think of it more as the Freed Unit at MGM.' (Arthur Freed being the man who made musicals with what amounted to a repertoire company of performers and production people, promoting along the way the careers of everyone from Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire to Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.) 'I love the idea of this group of people who worked at it and got better at it, developing the artists and the form,' Bourne adds.

After New York, Bourne crossed the country to Los Angeles. He toured the studios and the stars' homes, visited Disneyland, went to a Halloween ball hosted by Michael Jackson. 'He was actually there, walking around signing autographs,' he remembers. 'But I had no access to anyone or anything at that point and LA, when you don't know anyone, can be a very lonely place.' Still, it was this world he desperately wanted to be a part of. Back home, Bourne hung around the periphery of show business (he has particularly fond memories of his job in the bookshop at the National Theatre). Acting was the obvious way in, except for the slight problem that he hated the sound of his own voice. 'I was so self-conscious about using it; expressing myself through movement seemed to come more naturally. Things make sense when you move, rather than trying to string a sentence together.' But even blessed with that awareness, Bourne was 22 before he got started in the dance world, with a place at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance (now simply Laban) in Deptford.

He's grateful he came to it late. 'If I hadn't had my experience of all those things, I don't think my work now would connect with a much wider audience than the dance world. If I'd started young as a choreographer, as a dancer, the subject of my work would be movement, much more choreography as such, because I wouldn't have all those other influences.' Like the business of show that still captivates him.

He, on the other hand, is fiercely nostalgic. Give the man a time machine and he'd hightail it back to MGM's golden era. But the past has always appealed to Bourne in his work 'because you can comment on it more easily than the present. It's partly a character thing for me. I think repression is a very good theme for a lot of characters. Anyone who is coming to terms with who or what they are makes nice story material, but these days it's more difficult to find that. Somebody like Dirk Bogarde would not have been such a great actor if he didn't have quite such a repressed background. Ian McKellen would probably disagree about that. He'd say you don't need to suffer all your life to be a great actor. But it did make someone like Bogarde a more interesting performer, if not necessarily a happier person.'

So what is this reflective darkness in Bourne's soul? Is it gay-man melancholy? Has his life perhaps been defined by loss? Not at all. 'Only in recent times, when my mum died during the making of Edward Scissorhands,' he offers. 'I was always very happy actually. My life has been an extremely happy one. I didn't even struggle to come out that much. I was out happily at 18, in a very uncomplicated way, as soon as I realised I was gay.' Stir in his loving relationship (Arthur Pita, 12 years his junior, was a swan when they met 12 years ago), his two adorable dogs, his professional triumphs, and you've got to wonder why this is the man who doesn't like happy endings, who even fiddled with Edward Scissorhands to darken the original's finale. No redemption here. But why? 'I just don't know. I search to find what that thing is,' Bourne muses. 'I do like to feel something for the characters, so I feel I need to put them in situations where they are suffering in some way so they can win through. That's the arc of a good story. The more you make the character really happy here, then bring them down there, the more we as an audience will feel it. It's about the highs and the lows.'

Well, there's some gay-man melancholy for you. Bourne's only 48, for Fosse's sake! Never mind the self-denial of the simple pleasure of movement, especially given Bourne's feelings about Strictly Come Dancing. But he insists, 'I live through the performers, and I mould what they do, so I feel it's coming through them in a lot of ways. I feel as though it's me up there. Maybe it's that that satisfies me.'

Is it just my own morbid nature, or did Bourne just strike an elegaic note? He does it again when he says, 'I've done the dream projects. I've had that amazing privilege to be able to do what I want to do.' Like Mary Poppins. That had been on the cards since 1994, when Cameron Mackintosh played him the first new song for the musical. And Oliver! is an old friend, too. Bourne worked on the Sam Mendes production in 1994.

Now he quite fancies the idea of someone else setting him the challenge of making a dance piece out of 'that film, that book'. Given that melodramatic emotion makes for great dance pieces, it would be grand to see him take on, say, Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession? The title alone has Bourne written all over it) or the demented love story of his hero Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

As far as being 'the most famous choreographer in the world' goes, Bourne says simply, 'That comes from audience figures; bums on seats. There are many more talented choreographers than me who score movement in an incredible way. What I'm doing is bringing dance and theatre to audiences who never thought they would enjoy it in that way.' Then he goes on to offer his own fabulous sign-off. 'But I'm not Mr Dance. I can't be that person.'

Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands is at Sadler's Wells until 18 January (0844 412 4300; www.sadlerswells.com)