Word: grayness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...little more than a decade, Bourne, 48, and his London-based production company New Adventures, have redrawn the international theatrical landscape, attracting huge new audiences to their inventive and emotionally charged shows. On Aug. 22, at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, they launch Dorian Gray, a tale of modern celebrity meltdown based on Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. "It's very dark," says Richard Winsor, who dances the title role. "The book holds things back - but we're not holding anything back. Sexually, we're going further than we've ever gone...
...Dorian Gray idea gained impetus when Bourne read Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories and learned that Wilde's novel (which Booker describes as a "black fairy tale") headed the list of classic tragedies. And then there was the accidental death earlier this year of the actor Heath Ledger. "You have this beautiful, talented being dropped into another world - Hollywood - where everyone wants to get in with you," says Bourne. "Would he have died if he'd stayed in Australia, I wonder, or was he a victim of modern celebrity...
...Beyond Words In July 2009, Dorian Gray will head to Moscow's Mossovet Theater as part of the eighth Chekhov International Theater Festival. The seventh festival, in 2007, hosted Bourne's Swan Lake; the sixth, in 2005, featured his Play Without Words. "You can't imagine how popular Matthew is," says Galina Kolosova, coordinator of the festival. Play Without Words, which won an Olivier award following its run at London's National Theatre in 2003, is an adaptation of Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant. A witty, psychosexual drama set in an upper-class London household, it features...
...While acknowledging the riskiness of Dorian Gray's subject matter, Bourne and his people are cautiously upbeat about its future. The show has been financed almost entirely by the British venues where it will tour after its Edinburgh opening; in return for investing, they will receive a guaranteed share of box office. Another $300,000 or so has been provided by Arts Council England (a publicly funded body), but no "angels" have been tapped for an investment, so the production will not start in debt. "We're very light on our feet in that way," says Robert Noble, New Adventures...
...effect is potent and compelling. Back in Moscow, where she is preparing to travel to Edinburgh for the Dorian Gray premiere, Kolosova describes the reaction of the 91-year-old former Bolshoi ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya to Bourne's Swan Lake. Too frail to make it backstage from her box, the legendary People's Artist of the U.S.S.R. asked for a message to be sent to Bourne. "She wanted to tell him that this was the future," Kolosova recalls. "That this was the way forward...