Creature, by Akram Khan, review: a misfiring broadside on the billionaire space race

Creature, Akram Khan’s new work for English National Ballet, is a cast-iron disappointment. This is particularly sad given its cruelly long, lockdown-enforced gestation (it was supposed to premiere on April 1 last year); Khan’s blistering track record both with ENB (his short Dust, his full-length Giselle) and without them (from Zero Degrees to Desh to Xenos); and also, given the effort that has clearly been poured into it.

Two hours long, including an interval, it was inspired chiefly by Georg Büchner’s mid-19th-century play Woyzeck (with a dash of Frankenstein). It centres on a lone person – the titular Creature – being experimented on in a remote military Arctic research station, with the help of new suits and helmets: the idea is that if this human guinea pig can survive the cold and isolation here, then others will be able to evacuate the increasingly toxic earth and resettle elsewhere.

Herein lie all sorts of noble intentions on Khan’s part: a desire to mock the billionaire space race, to dramatise loneliness, state oppression, the perils of climate change. And nor is Khan’s ambition here merely intellectual: unlike Dust and Giselle, whose steps were roughly one part Kathak/contemporary (ie Khan’s “language”) to four parts classical (ENB’s), here, he boldly turns that on its head.

This, then, is bracingly modern dance – often angular, earthbound, staccato – with the odd classical flourish, and there are some moments of real choreographic inspiration. The fractured, belligerent goose-steps Khan gives to the oppressive corps; a late exit from the Major (the project’s domineering overseer) with a kind of seething, flesh-and-blood train of bodies attached to him; one particularly charming lift involving, of all things, a common-or-garden mop. And my, do ENB’s dancers put their backs into it.

The fundamental problem – and an issue I had with Khan’s “first draft” of Giselle back in 2016, but more gravely here – is the storytelling. Even having had a fascinating chat about the show with Khan a few weeks ago, and even with the synopsis sitting on my lap, I had little idea what was happening beyond the barest bones of the action, and other audience members I consulted afterwards admitted to being similarly flummoxed. In terms of narrative, far less would have been far more.

Nor does the actual production much help. Michael Hulls is a magician of lighting design, with a long history (especially with choreographer Russell Maliphant) of creating luminescence that you want ro run your hands over, drink down. But he is a creator of textures rather than a facilitator of plots, and there is a curiously static, uninspired quality to most of his work here.

As for Oscar-winner Tim Yip’s set, this – a kind of huge, rough-hewn log cabin – calls to mind the fantastic past creations of Michael Pabst for Pina Bausch, and promises much. But the effect it creates is tedium rather than claustrophobia, and the coup de théatre it promises never quite comes. It just sits there obdurately, mostly unchanged, for the show’s entire duration – the thunderously atmospheric sonic landscapes by another Khan regular, Vincenzo Lamagna, are relied on too much to propel the action forward.

Also, did the show really need a rape scene? Knowing the sensitively minded Khan, this will not have been included lightly, and I suspect it is not only a final cementing of the Major’s vileness, but also a symbolic abuse of the earth, of personal agency, of all that’s good. In such a woolly plot, though, it feels above all like yet another unnecessary violation of a female character (here, Creature’s inamorata Marie, lyrically played by Erina Takahashi) on a London dance stage.

For the dancers, however, only praise. And this is particularly true of ENB principal Jeffrey Cirio, an absolute lightning-bolt of a performer who can switch between elemental apoplexy and absolute tenderness in a nanosecond, and move with such precision and sheer speed that he’s like a walking special effect.

In fact, he feels like the perfect young exponent of Khan’s movement quality – so much so that I’d passionately urge the 47-year-old Khan, who has already stopped creating new shows for himself, to whip up one for him. In the meantime, my advice to dance fans is to save your pennies for Sadler’s November revival of Khan’s drop-dead-perfect solo show, Xenos. That, I promise, will blow your mind.

Until Oct 2. Tickets: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com