Didn’t the Hackney boy do well? Early Adventures comprises a reprise of some of Sir Matthew Bourne’s earliest choreography from the late 1980s and 90s. With Bourne’s work cresting with his current production of Red Shoes, following his stunningly successful interpretation of Sleeping Beauty, it feels entirely appropriate to revisit the original crystals sparkling in the crucible of Bourne’s modus operandi.

Early Adventures holds up well despite the passing of a quarter of a century. The sense of adventure in the movement and staging retain a contemporary feel, and the overall sense of wit and exuberance exhibited by the cast, coupled with Bourne’s saucy underpinning of sexual encounter in what could otherwise have been a syrupy mix, was enough to bring a full house to its feet at the conclusion. An audience member next to me exclaimed, “I wish I could just see it all again from the beginning!”

Born in 1960, Bourne would have heard the likes of Workers Playtime on his parents’ radio. The jolly melody that prefaced that show is just one of a string of nostalgic tunes that permeates the tableaux of British scenes he visits in the first two of the three presentations of the night: Watch With Mother and Town and Country. Others wistful strains included The Sleepy Lagoon, from Desert Island Discs and Sailing By from the Shipping Forecast. Later, in Bourne’s breakthrough 1980s hit The Infernal Galop, he called on the iconic voices of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet to conjure some decidedly English cliché ideas of all things French.

I particularly enjoyed the use of Percy Grainger’s own music and adaptations of Bach and Fauré to accompany the first piece, Watch with Mother. On a simple set made to look like a school gymnasium, ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ dressed either in grey flannel dresses or shorts drew on the movement in games such as hopscotch, conkers and Doctors and Nurses. Grainger’s piano was a reminiscent backdrop to those early BBC programmes for children in which the steady, kind voice of presenter Vera McKechnie invited us to peer inside the picture book. As they did throughout, the nine dancers always locked into the music’s pace and mood with the empathy of a pulsing amoeba, using the whole stage in a constant construction/deconstruction of ideas – a wonderfully watchable ensemble, all with equal star ratings, although I confess to particularly liking Japanese dancer Mari Kamata’s poise and interpretation.

In Bourne’s next piece, Town and Country, nostalgia again plays a huge role, from the heart-swelling Pomp and Circumstance from Edward Elgar, to the smoky nonchalance of a Noël Coward song we were taken back to the world of our grandparents. But Bourne knows not to play things super straight. He clearly likes to keep a sense of sexual frisson, straight and gay, lest we start to fidget too much – a naughty ‘nude’ bathroom scene, for instance, reminiscent of The Full Monty, think towels not balloons; gay waiters in a gloriously realised mini version of Brief Encounter upstaging the straight love affair, you get the idea. There is some plain old silly fun too with scooters swishing dancers across stage, and animal puppets getting big laughs too. Lez Brotherston’s sets always lent plenty of atmosphere, particularly in the Brief Encounter interlude and the Parisian setting later, but cleverly left enough for the imagination to fill.

And so to foggy Paris and France. Subtitled ‘A French dance with English subtitles’, with The Infernal Gallop Bourne has enormous fun with red-pompomed matelots and a dressing-gowned merman, a visit to a pissoir, and burgeoning gay sex interrupted hilariously by a street ‘band’s’ intrusions, before finally this wonderful cast were allowed to explode their very own take on the Can Can.

On a very soggy night in Bath, this was just what the doctor ordered it seemed. Rid of the real world for a moment, the crowd was joyous!   ★★★★★   Simon Bishop  4^th February 2017