Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures review – fully formed from the off

The three works comprising Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures were created at the beginning of the choreographer’s career, and look as fresh today as they did a quarter of a century ago. All the essential elements of his future success – the wit, the telling detail, the economy of means with which imaginary worlds are conjured – are already in place. Today’s choreographers tend to be wary of sentiment, but Bourne knows its power. What he has always understood is that old-fashioned cliche can, with a deft twist, express profound and unexpected truths, and he performs this sleight of hand in each piece.

Watch With Mother (1991), set to the nannyish tones of Joyce Grenfell and music by Percy Grainger, sees dancers in 1950s school uniform going through their paces in the gym. Galumphing boys essay lyrical and heroic poses, graceless girls throw themselves about. To see adults in children’s clothes is always unsettling, and there are echoes here of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Playground, and Dennis Potter’s TV drama Blue Remembered Hills. On the surface, Watch With Mother is comic, but there are dark undercurrents of spite and desire, and the piece is infused with a precisely delineated yearning.

Town and Country (1991) is, on the face of it, even more broadly comic. The “town” section features a ukulele-playing valet, a couple being bathed by their servants (much energetic use of loofahs), and a vignette in which two brilliantined chaps enact a shy but passionate courtship to a recording of Dearest Love, sung by Noël Coward. “Country”, meanwhile, features clumping yokels and daffy milkmaids, and following numerous balletic in-jokes at the expense of Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, culminates in the solemn funeral of a hedgehog. But again, there’s that other dimension that Bourne gives us, as Ashton did. A very specific and piercing sense of loss. That moment when, for no particular reason, the birds suddenly stop singing, and you think your heart will break.

The Infernal Galop (1989) is a droll satire about English perceptions of the French. There are matelots in stripy shirts, a surreal merman flapping like a seal to Charles Trenet’s La Mer, and jaunty gay assignments around a Paris pissoir. As always, Bourne squeezes the cliche until the pips squeak, and the result is as original as it is unmissable.