How the upper crust crumbles

Rigid class structures and the fantasies they inspire make for potent melodrama and equally exciting movement theater. From August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” to Jean Genet’s “The Maids,” intense parables of forbidden love and social revolt have not only become stage classics but also staples of the international ballet repertory.

Underlings again try to seduce and debase their masters in Matthew Bourne’s two-act dance drama “Play Without Words,” an adaptation of Joseph Losey’s somber 1963 film, “The Servant.” But here, wisely, the spectacle turns darkly comic, with everyone trapped in cycles of lust and exploitation that generate laughter more than shock or pity.

The upper-crust victim is now a mindless twit, the act of being waited upon a ritual of ridiculous self-indulgence and, as in Bourne’s “Swan Lake,” allowing an employee to apply your deodorant is a sign that you’re irrevocably doomed.

Created for England’s National Theatre, “Play Without Words” opened Monday at the Ahmanson Theatre for a six-week run. This fifth full-evening Bourne creation seen on local stages confirmed his knack for turning expressive gesture into powerful full-body statements, for inventing social dances that sharply parody their sources and, above all, for telling a story with extraordinary zest and originality.

Indeed, Bourne often tells this story in duplicate or triplicate, casting up to three company members in each major role. The innovation allows him to compress time with great assurance, showing the beginning, middle and end of a scene simultaneously -- the mating dance for the overbred Glenda and the brutal Speight, for instance.

In one double duet, a pair of performers depicts the manservant Prentice dressing young master Anthony while another pair depicts Prentice undressing him. The parallel actions are brilliantly timed so that they intersect perfectly at the pull of a zipper -- and this matching of activities turns what would otherwise be realistic pantomime into synchronous dancing.

Meanwhile, Lez Brotherston’s artfully skewed, indoor/outdoor set revolves into a number of picturesque configurations, and Terry Davies’ jazz score adds an edge of menace to a deft evocation of mod ‘60s breeziness.

As usual, you can expect Bourne to supply a lampoon of conventional dance -- in this case a televised rock boogaloo. And once again the members of his New Adventures company act as well as they move, making motion and emotion spring from a single impulse.

If there’s a flaw to Bourne’s satiric approach, it arguably lies in providing no character to really care about. Glenda comes the closest, and Michela Meazza’s performance on Monday went beyond the contemptible excesses built into the role -- the haughty treatment of the servants in Act 1, for instance -- to find a center of feeling and even rueful self-knowledge.

With not only Prentice but also Speight serving as forces of destruction, Glenda is quickly overpowered -- first by Scott Ambler’s superbly articulated cold fury in the former role (sometimes effectively doubled by Steve Kirkham) and next by Alan Vincent’s deliberately cheesy machismo in the latter.

Ewan Wardrop and Eddie Nixon shadow Vincent expertly, but in Act 1 he gets the closest thing to a conventional showpiece that “Play Without Words” ever offers: an explosive scramble all over the set that indelibly nails the character’s formidable power and dangerous rootlessness.

Relatively conventional cupidity comes in the form of the mock-demure housemaid Sheila, at her best when reclining on the kitchen table, whether played by Maxine Fone or Valentina Formenti. Certainly Sam Archer and Richard Winsor as facets of Anthony can’t resist her oh-so-casually-extended bare ankle, and they soon yield utterly to their basest natures in deft embodiments of a ruling class unfit to rule even itself.

Some critics have seen “The Servant” and other studies of tensions between upstairs and downstairs as outlets for upper-class guilt -- opportunities for moneyed, privileged audiences to sit comfortably in theater seats and atone for the inequities of the system that put them there. If so, “Play Without Words” adds ammunition by making Anthony utterly worthless, the butt of nearly all the evening’s jokes and callow even in his deepest anguish.

Yes he’s cute in a scrawny, pre-sexual sort of way but so hopeless at managing even his most mundane everyday activities that Prentice’s takeover is not merely inevitable but probably a godsend for everyone. Would you really want to see this clueless ninny spend his fortune, start a family, rule a business empire, go into politics?

If “The Servant” made the conflict between master and servant an index to everything wrong with England in 1963 -- a symbolic playoff, if you like, between the House of Lords and the House of Commons -- Bourne knows that we live in a different world.

We may still be obsessed with that hunky gardener or nubile receptionist, but they have all got sexual harassment lawyers now and we’ve had to learn how to put on our own knickers.

So Bourne looks back in laughter, extending the resources of contemporary dance to show us unspoken connections between people, classes and eras. Nobody does it better.

*

‘Play Without Words’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions and additions.

Ends: May 29

Price: $30 to $85

Contact: (213) 628-2772, www.TaperAhmanson.com

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes