Play Without Words

Daily Mail, Michael Coveney, 17 December 2003
An evening of brilliant theatre (and not a work is spoken or a phrase sung).

At the end of a fantastic year, the National Theatre presents a fantastic show.

Using a new jazz score of amazing, atmospheric brilliance by Terry Davies, Bourne recreates the Sixties while scoring beautiful modern points against that era.

This is pure theatre, combining a nostalgic take on the Sixties with a modern view of social and sexual relationships.

Play Without Words restores a sense of playfulness and physical ingenuity to the theatre that most modern dramatists simply do not understand.

There is nothing else in London quite like this show (apart from Bourne’s brilliant Nutcracker! At Sadler’s Wells) and I thoroughly recommend it to your Christmas ‘must-see’ list.

The dancers are all marvellous – young, supple and sexy, and the brilliant, evocative design is by Lez Brotherston (sets) and Paule Constable (lights).

The Guardian, Michael Billington, 17 December 2003
…witty, erotic piece of dance-drama…

…Bourne adds to a rich mix an evocation of Soho jazz clubs and swinging London.

…a strong sense of a changing England in which posh totties are drawn to an ascendant working class and in which master-servant relationships are decisively inverted.

Davies's music conjures up the dingy jazz boites of the period

…the triumph belongs to Bourne and his sexily inventive dancers, who not only left me profoundly stirred but who use movement to express social upheaval.

Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh, 17 December 2003
…fascinating…compelling…

The moody dynamism of Terry Davies’ 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.

…brilliant performers…

The Independent (Review), Zoe Anderson, 18 December 2003
Stupendous seduction in Sixties cool

Matthew Bourne takes his gift for choregraphing body language to brilliant extremes in Play Without Words…

…a story of repression, seduction and social upheaval, witty period comedy edging into eroticism and menace.

The period detail is superb… Terry Davies’s jazz score evokes a world of Sixties movies, from party music to cool.

Play Without Words manages to be explicit and ambiguous in the same breath …vividly erotic…
The cast, full of Bourne regulars, is magnificent.
It’s stylish, witty and very moving.

Daily Telegraph, Ismene Brown, 18 December 2003
This is about sex – no sexxx, since the story’s done in triplicate.

Spellbound by sensuality
Darkly erotic …not a dance but a drama of dazzlingly choreographed body language.

Matthew Bourne brings the 1960s to life in his astonishing Play Without Words at the Lyttelton Theatre, in an atmosphere that’s almost unbelievably erotic.

…overwhelms the senses …spellbinding… the cast are uniformly magnetic.

Terry Davies’s jazz score is quite superb, delivered by a splendid band…

The Times, Ian Johns, 18 December 2003
Dedicated followers of passion

…a very enjoyable retelling of the iconoclastic concerns, moods and manners of Sixties film, when London was about to swing …melds dance moves and stylised everyday gestures to evoke passion that is poisoned by a crumbling class divide.

…as well as a sexily agile ensemble, there’s Terry Davies’s marvellously evocative jazz score…

…stylish entertainment…

Financial Times, Alastair Macauley, 18 December 2003
…nothing about Play Without Words is more brilliant than its various uses of duplicates and triplicates.

Bourne’s dance actors are superb in every nuance of body language…

The whole production is redolent of 1960s atmosphere, thanks largely to Terry Davies’ jazz-style score and the disconcertingly spot-on designs by the peerless Lez Brotherston.

Metro, Keith Watson, 18 December 2003
…there’s really no excuse for not catching it…a slick and sophisticated masterclass in stagecraft…

…Bourne has conjured up a timeless period piece where the ingenuity of the staging (Lez Brotherston’s set is a brilliant evocation of 1960s London) is matched by the power of the emotional undertow tugging at its heart.

…Bourne fills the stage with dark desires and suppressed emotions...The pyjama-clad eroticism of Act Two will snap the drawstrings of your heart.

…Bourne’s hard work is carried aloft every step of the way by a superb cast, drawn from his regular collaborators, who more than prove the old adage that actions really do speak louder than words.

Play Without Words finished on: 6 March 2004