Flying too close to the sun in tap shoes and a flicker of neon
We are, by now, so accustomed to stories that arrive quickly with a romance playing out in a minute of video and a thriller inside a scroll that our patience has adjusted to match. It is oddly fitting then that Stories, the self-styled “Tap Dance Sensation” has decided to take a lifetime of cinematic drama and deliver it in a single breathless hour.
The tap is a long way from the polished, drawing-room variety that old film musicals taught us to expect and Romain Rachline Borgeaud, who wrote, composed, directed, choreographed and produced the show for his own RB Dance Company, seems determined that nobody should leave thinking of top hats. He built an urban and energetic show in which the clickety-clacks take second place to the swagger of modern jazz and commercial dance, so that the whole body is working and not merely the feet, and the final effect is closer to a music video that happens to be wearing tap shoes. The company throws itself at it with remarkable stamina, restless and relentless from the first scene to the last. It is true that the movement can settle into a familiar pattern once the novelty has worn off, but the energy never dips for a moment and this is the sort of dancing that is easy to be carried along by even when the choreography keeps to comfortable ground.
Icarus (Thimêo Garin), a young screen sensation, is held firmly in the orbit of his director (Jérôme Louis). The relationship is established so economically with Garin, boyish and instantly easy to root for, while Louis, tall and quietly menacing, hovers over him in a way that makes his eventual bid for freedom something we want badly, even as the plot sweeps him through a street fight, a brief romance with a girl in a red dress, a hotel, a casino and a ride on the tube. A cast of fewer than fifteen somehow reads as a crowd, helped along by costumes that move from black suits to casino red and on to the mustard tones of the hotel and hairstyles changing to match, and since there is no interval to break the momentum, the stage always feels full and the dancers never appear to tire.
Where Stories truly earns its keep is in the staging. Federica Mugnai’s set amounts to little more than two rotating blocks and two rotating staircases, yet under Alex Hardellet’s lighting they turn into whatever the story happens to need, with beams running down the sides of each block so that every quarter turn throws a fresh pattern across the stage. One block glows from the inside and becomes a jail cell, complete with a door for the dancers to slip through, and the same pieces are then recycled as streets, a hotel or an underground station. A key highlight is the tube, where Icarus heads down a staircase and the blocks swing round to make a carriage full of commuters reading their papers face to face, a thin strip of light between each pair doing the work of a window, until a last rotation slides everything apart and the doors open as if on cue. The lighting design is so inventive that the audience is left impatient to see what Hardellet will try next.
The score is a driving, percussive soundtrack with a deep male voice reciting slightly clunky verses on loop. The woman in the red dress, for instance, is described as a mess and a pretty girl in the same breath, with the “damn”emphasised, one imagines a French company picturing how English people speak and deciding, rather sweetly, that it sounds cool. It is a bit cringe and rather intense, and the songs often feel as though they are there to explain the plot, narrating love, work and loss because an hour leaves no time to dramatise some of it.
The plot, meanwhile, reaches towards themes of love, lust, revenge, murder and ambition crammed into the hour, along with a hotel, a casino and a mirror on one of the blocks that hints at questions of identity. Similarly to Carman, everyone involved works hard in superb outfits while smoking around the clock and Icarus breaks this pattern by reaching for an inhaler at a singular point. It feels as though the company wanted Stories to be the next great tale told through tap, with every theme and every gesture of the great melodramas, and the ambition is thrilling.
Given more time, each of these threads could have unfolded properly, the mirror in particular, and a longer running time would simply be an excuse to spend more of the evening in its company.
Icarus, as the myth reminds us, flew too close to the sun and it is tempting to read the production in the same light. But that nerve is what makes it such good fun: mesmerising from the first bar to the last, it sends the audience home buzzing, still thinking about the lights, the blocks and the tireless feet, and certain they have seen something special.
Stories is at the Peacock Theatre, London, until Saturday 31st October.