The Car Man, Sadler's Wells, London

We have come to expect a great deal of Matthew Bourne, the man who turned Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake into a challenge for tear-proof mascara, and a hit so long-running that even your mother-in-law's cleaner had got around to seeing it twice. One of those expectations is that, in the absence of a new show (the next is due for autumn 2008), he will keep on reviving the old ones, and they'll keep getting better each time. So it's odd that The Car Man – his radical rewrite of Bizet's Carmen – has had to wait seven years for its first re-issue. More rough-cut and raunchy than anything else in the Bourne portfolio, its current four-week run, followed by a UK tour, is certain to make new converts to his distinctive genius.

Forget Carmen's cigarette factory: Bourne sets his tale in a garage, in the early Sixties in the American Midwest. This is the land of the grimy drive-in diner where couples canoodle among the ketchup, where bare-knuckle fights serve as Saturday night fun, and the arrival in town of a well-hung stranger is about as eventful as it gets. That is until the stranger gives the garage-owner's wife a full service and MOT, and bludgeons her flatulent spouse with a spanner. Fate and malice combine to lay the blame on an innocent garage worker, who has his own reasons for not naming the real murderer. He is madly in love with him, too.

As in all of Bourne's own-brand shows, The Car Man's strength is its dramatic clarity, and, yes, its narrative drive. This is dance as a means of telling a good yarn – so edge-of-your-seat good, so well furnished with subplots and psychological undertow that you have to pinch yourself to realise it's done without words.

What's different is the influence of American film noir, not just on the show's period setting but its cinematic technique. With the help of Chris Davey's clever lighting, it takes just one opening, panning long-shot to introduce every character, motivation and theme. We see the heat and boredom in this blue-collar community, the slobbishness of Scott Ambler's Dino, who knows his wife no longer fancies him and drinks to forget; Michela Meazza's louche, tousle-haired Lana, who with one roll of the eyes and sulky loll of the hips lets you know that the "Man Wanted" sign on the garage forecourt is more than just a job ad, and Richard Winsor's meek, sexually indeterminate Angelo, struggling to connect with this hard, heartless world.

Lez Brotherston's do-it-all set is key to the narrative flow. A two-storey garage block, complete with grimy windows and rusting fire-escapes, abuts a greasy caff with tables and chairs, while leaving sufficient floorspace for 16 energetic performers and two Model T Fords with hoods up. In the second half, the same garage structure serves as a row of prison cells and an Andy Warhol-style nightclub, in which Bourne stages one of his signature dance-parodies, a funny take-off of angst-ridden Martha Graham.

The best dance inspiration comes in the solo numbers, including a tour de force for Alan Vincent's Brando-esque stranger, wheeling off tables and chairs while swigging beer and wagging his bum to Bizet's famous "Seguidilla", landing back in his seat on the triumphant final chord as the waitress plonks down the food. Another highlight is the randy dance for Meazza's Lana, slapping the floor in her waitress pinny like Barbarella on Viagra.

The group choreography is less memorable but always entertaining, the girls strenuous to the point of butch in their print-cotton frocks, the guys rugged in oily denim. One dance makes a sly reference to the original opera, as a mixed quartet pass two cigarettes from mouth to mouth. Otherwise, the dances translate elements of manual work – winching, wrenching, wiping sweaty brows. Bourne's unique talent is to make every item take the story forward, so that even during the breeziest knees-up there is often some sinister activity in a corner, or in an upstairs room. The way he guides the gaze to these events is masterly.

Bizet's score is rendered at one remove through the eerie orchestrations – for a reduced band of strings and percussion – by Rodion Shchedrin, with additions by Terry Davies. What a pity Bourne felt the need for electronic amplification. It was only when the conductor Benjamin Pope climbed out of the pit to take his applause that I realised the music was live.

Sadler's Wells (0870 737 7737) to 5 Aug, then touring