Sex, lies and northern grit

Matthew Bourne's 'Play Without Words' is a paean to chippy 1960s Brit-flicks, says David Benedict

'Sexual intercourse," opined Philip Larkin, "began in 1963". Not according to those who watched Heather Sears's Susan lying clearly post-coital on the riverbank with chippy, dishy Laurence Harvey's Joe in Room at the Top in 1959 it didn't. But it wasn't just ground-breaking sex that made that film a classy affair. Four months ahead of the arrival of much-trumpeted Angry Young Man prototype Jimmy Porter in the film of Look Back In Anger, Harvey personified British cinema's first major working-class hero. Driven less by anger than envy, he's blisteringly resentful of "boys with the big mouths and the silver spoons stuck in them". Which is where Matthew Bourne comes in.

The choreographer's smouldering, jazz-drenched Play Without Words is a taut and terrific retelling of the absolutely iconoclastic class concerns, moods and manners of Sixties film. Mercifully, there's nothing so crass as danced scenes from Room at the Top but Bourne's show - the hugely popular winner of this year's Olivier award for Best Entertainment - focuses on its ideas, especially the fact that as Joe takes debutante Susan's virginity in another thin-lipped, zealous step towards marrying money and status, he's also secretly enjoying unbridled sex with the magnificently wordly-wise, older, married and declassé Simone Signoret. "She's all-woman," remarks someone in the local pub and although it's a sneer, it's also astonishingly accurate about Signoret's breathcatching, Oscar-winning performance. Fatally, however, her tragic dignity helped sanctify the twin roles for women in Sixties British film: nice girls who didn't and bad girls who did.

The film takes place in drab Warnley Town replete with industrial settings, dog-racing and back-to-back housing, ie "oop North". Real life, for the emergent new wave, immediately became synonymous with the working class, and the further north the better, a fact made plain less than a year later in Karel Reisz's tremendous Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Albert Finney is a check-shirted lathe worker in a Nottingham factory and although, yes, he's torn between sex with older, married Rachel Roberts and love for lovely young Shirley Anne Field, his star-making acting and Reisz's documentary background create a superbly composed depiction of class that is genuinely dramatic and properly politicised.

Northern social realism resurfaces 18 months later in John Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving (1962) with unusual lyricism. It patronises no one, not even Thora Hird's middle-class harridan and certainly not troubled young leads Vic (Alan Bates) and Ingrid (June Ritchie) who struggle with sex vs marriage. When Ingrid ruefully remarks, "It's rotten being a girl, sometimes," you feel she's speaking on behalf of all Sixties screen women.

Prior to the pill, their dilemma remained undimished but at least they found their way to London. In 1962, Leslie Caron, another safely French but shockingly unmarried mother-to-be, pitched up in then deeply down-at-heel Notting Hill in Bryan Forbes's The L-Shaped Room.

The traditional image of London was suits, bowlers and tightly-rolled umbrellas. But the seedier side - the West End by night, backstreet blackmail and shifty male eye-contact in The Salisbury (the pub still standing on St Martin's Lane) - was laid bare a year earlier in Victim.

This wholly serious drama was consciously made to effect legal change. Homosexuality was then punishable by prison sentence with hard labour and audiences were won over by the film's compassion and power, much of which stemmed from an extraordinarily brave central performance. Unmarried Dirk Bogarde played a married lawyer who admits, in a close-up scene of staggering intensity, to a gay relationship. His performance catapulted him into the major league, a position consolidated by his thrillingly unctuous and malevolent portrayal of the lead role in The Servant (1963).

The bare-faced announcement of class in the title of The Servant indicates the tradition from which Joseph Losey's masterpiece springs. Blacklisted by McCarthy, Wisconsin-born Losey directed a succession of British films (initially under a pseudonym) including the overly-feverish but fascinating The Sleeping Tiger (1954) in which Alexis Smith, married to a psychiatrist, has a torrid affair with a tearaway who is one of her husband's patients, played by Bogarde. It heralded Losey's outsider's eye on class. "I was still a foreigner in England - I'm a foreigner wherever I am and always will be," he later observed.

The Servant is the apotheosis of the British new wave, a film of supreme visual and intellectual confidence brilliantly shot in high-contrast black and white by Douglas Slocombe. The audacious script has startlingly little dialogue, preferring to work visually and aurally though dangerously long takes, mirror shots and menacing figures looming into the frame in deep focus. So it's unsurprising that Bourne borrows much of its narrative and atmosphere to drive Play Without Words.

And although the film's women are again split between smart (Wendy Craig) and slutty (Sarah Miles), the film-makers address the divide. Together with jazz composer and Losey regular John Dankworth (who also did Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) they fashion the issues long beloved of its first-time screenwriter Harold Pinter - men, women, class and power - into an iconoclastic gripper, a triumph of suggestive ambiguity.

Nothing, not even their later collaboration Accident (1967), was as daring. The revolution had moved on by then because the rules changed with the arrival of the so-called "permissive society" both effected and reflected by films like Darling (1965). Schlesinger teamed Bogarde up with the jet-set sophistication of Julie Christie in fashionably spotted headscarves plus a gay photographer subplot and, hey presto, Oscars galore!

Romance is the essence of cinema - the enraptured gaze of audience and camera - and Sixties filmmakers fell in love with hitherto unseen lives and loves. The success of Darling and Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and The Knack, however, proved that British film was on the move again. Directors were getting romantic about Georgy Girl's kooky, kinky-booted optimism and on 15 April 1966, Time magazine coined the phrase "Swinging London". Would anyone have dreamt that, almost 40 years later, they'd still be dancing about it?

'Play Without Words': National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 6 March