You'll have to queue for returns or pray for a transfer if you want to catch Matthew Bourne's latest dance drama, a dark adaption of Oscar Wilde's only novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," published in 1891.
But whilst Wilde's Dorian had an ageing portrait secreted in the attic as he himself remained ever youthful, Bourne's angular, jagged, contemporary ballet creates an alternative version in which Dorian is a waiter who becomes the new face of a male perfume, "Immortal," with his image plastered on a huge billboard. Instead of by a painter, his beauty is captured by Aaron Sillis's muscular photographer in black leather, and the circle to which this bisexual Dorian's good looks gain him access isn't the high society of the upper classes but the superficially glamorous world of fashion. The hedonistic debauchery and trail of death remains, and as Richard Winsor's Dorian indulges in greater and greater excess, the only sign of a conscience is the Doppelganger which first appears after he callously watches one of his many lovers die from a drug overdose right in front of his eyes.
As one might expect from Bourne (who leapt to fame with his homoerotic "Swan Lake") characters from the novel are reimagined as the opposite sex. But then that might well have been what Wilde himself would have done had the law not forbade it. There's an overreliance on orgiastic bump and grind choreography for the chorus of hangers-on, and purists – be they balletomanes or devotees of the writer – may gripe. But, with Terry Davies' sinister percussive music and designer Lez Brotherston's revolving wall design, Bourne has created a stylised satire which, as an outsize glitterball replica of Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted skill rotates overhead, reflects on the shallow hedonism of today's culture of modern celebrity.
Sadler's Wells, Rosebery Avenue, EC1 (0844-412 4300) Until September 14. £10 - £49
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