Matthew Bourne: The difference an '!' makes

Ten years on, Matthew Bourne's 'Nutcracker' (now called 'Nutcracker!') is more magical than ever, and its creator has never been happier, as he tells Nadine Meisner when they meet at Sadler's Wells

Try as he may, Matthew Bourne can't be anything else but accessible. "I don't think I can do anything that's not audience-oriented," he chuckles. "I'm eager to please." Even with Play without Words, his take on the film The Servant, commissioned last summer for the National Theatre's Transformations season, he didn't manage to be abstruse. "I started off very seriously, I wanted it to be an experiment, but it turned out quite accessible."

That accessibility is what made him, and his dance company Adventures in Motion Pictures, an enormous success, peaking with a Swan Lake (1995) in which the swans are a flock of men. The production was such a hit that it transferred to the West End for two seasons and played on Broadway. Before that there had been Highland Fling (1994), a version of La Sylphide, set in a Glasgow council estate; and before that a Nutcracker (1992), premiered on an Opera North Tchaikovsky double bill, which began in a grim Victorian orphanage. Ten years on, this Nutcracker gets a fresh lick of paint, an exclamation mark – Nutcracker! – and a nine-week season at Sadler's Wells.

This is a crafty move by Sadler's Wells, which has been on the prowl for a popular Christmas show and has contributed a third of the budget. Not only that, it has given Bourne a roomy office for a year, where he now sits, with his posters on the wall.

Not so long ago, Bourne's pleasant 42-year-old face had been happily gazing round the Old Vic, after the announcement, with great fanfare, that it was AMP's new base. Bourne professes some regret at not presenting Nutcracker! there. "I have fond memories of the place. But you go where the money is, and Sadler's Wells came up with funds, and the Old Vic couldn't."

Another reason for the move is Bourne's break-up with AMP and its producer, Katharine Doré. "Katharine and I were going in different directions in our ambitions. Although I liked reviving pieces and wanted them to be seen in different places, my ambitions were always to create new work." Doré's vision for extensive touring of the AMP brand was, he felt, getting out of hand. "The production office was getting bigger and bigger to make these tours work – at one point, there were 12 full-time members of staff. And then there was talk about doing more than one piece simultaneously, using different companies, while at the same time I would make new pieces with a bunch – any bunch – of people. I felt we were working for the upkeep of the producer's office rather than for a company that you could develop as performers."

As any restaurant-chain customer knows, expansion diminishes quality. "By spreading ourselves too thin, I didn't think we could recreate the work well enough. I felt it was all getting a bit too grand. I wanted to get back to basics without feeling I was letting everyone down. I love doing the big pieces, but it's great to do small things, too."

Swan Lake still belongs to AMP and is about to start a foreign tour. Bourne can't stop it, and clashing dates meant he couldn't be involved in rehearsals either. AMP also owns his Cinderella and The Car Man. "But I'd be happy to collaborate with Katharine on these, mainly because I'd like to see the people who invested money in my productions get it back. What I don't like is when this happens without me."

He has now launched New Adventures, a company with the same number of performers, many familiar from AMP. Play without Words was the first project under this fresh identity. He loved doing it, because the pressure to meet a box-office quota, associated with commercial shows like Swan Lake, was off. "It was running only for three weeks; it could be experimental; and it didn't have to have a title that everyone could recognise. If it had been a flop it wouldn't have mattered so much, because we weren't having to live off it for the next year."

That's where a commercial show can be tricky. "Everyone thinks commercial work makes money, but usually – unless it's mega-successful – it only pays for itself. So, with Swan Lake we had to sell 60 per cent in the week to keep it going, to pay the wages and bills." Does that mean he is not, after all, wildly rich? "The misunderstanding with Swan Lake is that it was always sold out. Swan Lake was never sold out – or maybe five shows were." If anything does keep him going in the absence of Arts Council funding in London, it's My Fair Lady, for which he did the choreography. "Thank God for it," he repeats, fervently.

The narrative-inclined West End ties in with his own approach as a choreographer. "Movement invention is not my first reason for doing a piece. My work is about telling a story, emotion, humour: these are the reasons for the movement." He sees himself more as a director of movement than dance; he tries to blur the distinctions between movement, dance, mime and acting. "I get dancers to think like actors. If I'm working on a duet, for example, we'll talk about everything but the movement before we start. That way, they'll know as much as I do, so they can feed ideas into the choreographic process and tell me when something doesn't feel right for the character."

Despite the capital raised by theatres such as Sadler's Wells and sponsors, Nutcracker! will be a "semi-commercial" enterprise, because it won't be able to survive without selling tickets. (It gets Arts Council help on tour.) Created for Opera North, then staged by AMP, the decision substantially to revise the production comes not because of any copyright issues. "No one really owns it as such. So I thought that to stop it becoming awkward, we'll rechoreograph it, not pretend it never existed, but just say – here's a new production."

Everything about it is fresh, except for the scenario, which, as before, travels from the orphanage to the land of snow and on to Sweetieland. "However, anyone who saw it eight or 10 years ago, will think, oh it's the same – I've seen this, I remember this!" Bourne laughs. "But every costume is different, every step. It's just that it looks enough like the old version." Andrew Ward, who has done the redesign, worked on the first production as well, since when Bourne has collaborated with him on Oliver! and My Fair Lady. The characters populating Sweetieland include gobstoppers, knickerbocker glories, marshmallows and liquorice allsorts. "It's a place where you're judged by how you taste rather than how you look, so there're a lot of people licking each other."

"It's a layered show," he continues. "There's nothing in it to offend anyone, but there are things that adults will get and not children. I tried to make it as much for boys as girls. It's about children who are suffering in a bittersweet kind of way. Then they rebel and escape into a fantasy world. The Victorian grimness means that when they do break out, you feel that they've really gone somewhere wonderful."

Wonderful is how he feels at present. "I feel very happy, sort of free. I feel I'm going back to the basics of 10 or 15 years ago. We can just think about the work and what we'd like to do next. We could be commissioned by a theatre, or we could make a film, or we could do something abroad."

'Nutcracker!' is at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London N1 (020-7863 8000) from Wednesday to 25 January, and then tours from 3 February to 24 May