Matthew Bourne is celebrating 25 years of his company’s existence with Early Adventures, three productions that began to establish his name. I saw these works first time round, when one had no idea of what was to follow; looking back now across his many major successes one can see in them not the seeds of something that would grow, but the Bourne style already fully formed.

There is a touch of nostalgia in these pieces, which clearly highlight Bourne’s love of classic films and musicals, but there are also lots of laughs, and some very witty ideas.

Spitfire is very funny, but also rather beautiful. Bourne has taken Pas de Quatre, a 19th-century work created to display the talents of four great ballerinas, and re-set it in the 1950s, in the world of mail-order catalogues. Four male models, in a selection of white underwear, pout and preen, exuding vanity as they strut their stuff, competing for our attention, and then coming together in a series of poses, as if for a photograph. Bourne uses very classical steps to put this over, each pose ending with the dancers lifting their arms in a perfect port-de-bras, but with clenched fists.

Town and Country is the longest of these works. The music is a compendium of pieces by Elgar, Coates, Grainger, Coward and others. There is a delightful scene in which a man and a woman take baths, scrubbed and massaged by servants, screened by carefully held towels in the manner of a fan dance. Further on, two men, who do not wish to admit that they are gay, gradually lose their reservations and fall in love.

There is a railway-station sequence in the manner of Brief Encounter, and a bucolic dance for yokels in smocks, witnessed from the wings by a puppet fox and hedgehog. The latter is accidentally trampled on, and we see his funeral procession, with the cast of nine marching slowly across the stage to solemn music. Later, Jolly people on scooters disturb the country idyll of the male lovers.

Finally The Infernal Galop takes us to Paris in the 1950, another dose of nostalgia to a background of songs by Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet and Tino Rossi.

There’s a rather noisy, over-the-top sequence involving a man in a pissoir; two sad girls miss their lost lovers; there are matelots in stripy jerseys, a rapturous dance for two euphoric couples declaring their love, and finally, to Offenbach’s can-can music, (correctly named The Infernal Galop), the cast let loose in a party atmosphere, but without high kicks or knickers on show.

A great evening at Oxford Playhouse.