At the recent premiere screening of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake in 3D, a member of the audience asked Bourne how he manages to tell stories without words. While the question was within the context of Swan Lake, it would have been far more obvious to mention Play Without Words, originally commissioned by the National Theatre in 2002 as part of their Transformation season, which was devised to appeal to younger audiences with experimental works.

As part of Matthew Bourne's 25-year anniversary celebrations, Play Without Words follows hot on the heels of the retrospective of his earliest works, Early Adventures, which saw the young Bourne veer between a theatrical path and a pure dance path. In Play Without Words, Bourne clearly leapfrogged over the entire dance spectrum, creating a work which lies somewhere in the grey area between physical theatre and dance theatre, too tightly choreographed and performed to truly belong to the physical theatre world, and with too little dance content to be at home in the world of dance theatre.

In the Play Without Words programme, Matthew Bourne explains that he has cast two or three dancers for each role to highlight the choreography for each character, which would probably be overlooked if only one dancer is performing each role, but not if two or three dancers are performing simultaneously, or variations of each role. And there lies the genius of Play Without Words: not in the storytelling, but of watching the dancers move and interact with each other.

The storyline itself, flimsy though it is, is based on Harold Pinter's 1963 film The Servant, and Play Without Words recreates a world set in 1963, influenced by several other new wave British films from that period. The story follows Anthony and his manservant Prentice, who rises up against the three Anthonies - cowering underneath the stairs to escape him - and finally ending on an equal footing. Additional characters include Glenda, Anthony's fiancée, and Sheila, the housemaid-in-duplicate-only. And yes, if you add all them up, they amount to quite a lot of people on stage at any time. The effect is often that of the museum scene in the Thomas Crown Affair remake: lots of identical characters, but which ones are which?

Considering the storytelling of Matthew Bourne's other works such as Swan Lake, The Car Man or Cinderella, people expecting similarly coherent storytelling from Play Without Words will be disappointed, as the show drifts from morning to afternoon to evening, from indoors to outdoors and between characters. But this is Matthew Bourne's work, after all, so we're rewarded by the tiny gestures and nuances: in one scene, Anthony ( Richard Windsor ) is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper while Prentice nonchalantly turns the pages as he walks past, then drops a cushion behind Anthony's back when he leans forward. In other sequences we see different outcomes for the characters: for example after the Prentices' uprising, one Prentice sits in the armchair while his Anthony sits on the floor beside him being patted on the head; another Prentice reluctantly pours a drink for his master, while the third Prentice is sitting on the stairs giving Anthony a shoulder rub.

Play Without Words, now ten years old, is a timely exploration of what choreography can achieve, with the upcoming Place Prize and its interest in stretching the boundaries of choreography. And while the choreography is astounding, with razor-sharp performances from the cast, it is let down by its storytelling which prevents it from being a truly amazing show.