Matthew Bourne's dance thriller moves Bizet's Carmen to a 1950s American garage-diner, and New Adventures closed the Sadler's Wells summer with it in August 2026.
Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures danced The Car Man, his thriller after Bizet’s Carmen, at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Angel from Thursday 20 to Saturday 29 August 2026. The run closed the theatre’s summer before its autumn dance season.
Bizet’s opera Carmen dates from 1875. Terry Davies built the ballet’s score on Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite, itself an arrangement of Bizet’s music.
Bourne moves the Spanish cigarette factory to a garage-diner in Harmony, a fictional town in the American Midwest of the 1950s. Carmen and Don José give way to Lana, a mechanic’s wife, and Luca, a drifter who arrives in town. The piece is frank about sex and violence.
The Car Man previewed at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth on 16 May 2000 and opened at the Old Vic that September. It has returned in revival since, and its Shchedrin score is among the most recognisable in the New Adventures repertoire.
Sadler’s Wells has long programmed Bourne’s company and billed New Adventures above the title. The ten performances were the whole London engagement of the summer’s revival, in the two-act staging that has toured since Plymouth.