Play Without Words

Synopsis

Chelsea, 1965. Behind the privileged facade of domestic social order lies a struggle for power, territory and sexual domination. In a suave Chelsea home an urbane master and his beautiful fiancee welcome their new manservant, Prentice. What follows will change their lives forever.

Our Review:

2 July 2012

Choreographer Matthew Bourne is one of the more imaginative, experimental directors of dance working in the UK today. Triumphant innovations have included a male corps de ballet in Swan Lake and a terpsichorean version of Edward Scissorhands. And it is to film that he returns again for this revival of a 2002 work originally created for the National Theatre.

Play Without Words is, as its name suggests, a non-verbal interpretation of the narrative of the 1963 Dirk Bogarde film The Servant. That movie, with its Harold Pinter script and carefully judged hints at (then illegal) homosexuality, was a powerful exploration of social attitudes of the time.

Bourne’s great achievement, with his reinvention of the story, is to increase its narrative power, paradoxically by removing the words.

Some of the success of this process is down to the brilliant device of having two or even three dancers play each of the main roles at the same time – Anthony, the centra...

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