Theatre - Dancers bare of chest and tight of trouser are intense to watch, writes Julian Clary
Naked
Sadler's Wells, London EC1
Well, it just won't do. You can't call a show Naked, have two naked people on the poster and then not get your kit off. If you buy a tin labelled "baked beans", you expect beans of the baked variety to be found inside it. Jesus Christ Superstar at least had the good manners to deliver the Messiah as promised.
My companion and I had discussed at some length our understandable concerns regarding the bareback dancing we were about to enjoy. Would not unsupported male genitalia fly around somewhat? Might they get crushed? Aroused? In the way? We needn't have worried. Semi-Naked would be a more appropriate title. Three lithe couples get out their torsos and nipples, but the more intimate body parts are not on display.
But tarry a while: all is not lost. The dancing starts and you realise what it's all about. I guess modern dance is open to interpretation, but the title, I decided, had more to do with emotional exposure. Six dancers, including Naked's creators - Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt, aka the Ballet Boyz - turn and tumble, reject and embrace, desire and abhor. It's as if all their few-and-far-between moments of true, honest communication had been distilled, spoken to us in a new language.
Watching is an intense experience, causing (in me at least) a kind of sensory overload. If your chosen dance topic is emotional nakedness, then there is not going to be a lot of light and shade. No room here for a jolly interlude in which we can all catch our breath. That is fine by me. Comedy in ballet (with the exception of Lindsay Kemp) hardly ever makes me laugh. Clog dancers, jesters and fops - I can take 'em or leave 'em. The nearest we get to a "breather" in Naked is a beautiful and moving solo to Patsy Cline's "Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray", but that, reader please note, is danced with all the agonised wistfulness that the song really expresses - not for any camp value it might have.
In fact, there is nothing intentionally camp about this show. The men are macho to the point of being slightly abusive. The women are chucked about like dolls, and I seriously consider phoning social services during the interval. It is only at the curtain call that I smile to myself: the three women look just like willowy ballerinas should, taking their applause in time- honoured fashion; but the three men, bare of chest and tight of trouser, look like they're off to The Hoist for the evening. All that "I'm not a fag" acting wasted in a moment's carelessness . . .
But that is a minor - not to say fickle and facetious - point. What we are seeing, I am sure, is raw and relentless and brilliant. The dancing is both stunningly precise and convincingly expressive. As an experiment in sustained intensity, it is breathtaking but, by its very nature, brief. Less is more in such circumstances; and, lasting an hour and 35 minutes (interval included), it is, shall we say, a pleasingly compact evening.
Bob Crowley's set is a white room with a white bed and four windows draped in white muslin. Per- haps he was inspired by Changing Rooms's Linda Barker, because there is a whiff of Ikea about it. Even when spooky shadows slide around the walls, I'm thinking "pop video", though I feel I shouldn't.
To the sides of the room, we see bare black bricks and the lights on their stands: a naked (a theme is emerging) backstage area.
The music is by Murcof and Richard English, so there is lots of banging and a fair amount of discordant synth. I didn't mind it at all, and clearly it has inspired Nunn and Trevitt to choreograph some dreamlike physical gurning and complex, osteopathic manoeuvres.
If you are going to bother with clothes at all in a show called Naked, then the costume designer Fotini Dimou is your woman. She has come up with hempy, cheese-clothy creations that cling in all the right places but waft when required.
I'm glad the dancers kept themselves nice, I surprise myself by thinking at the end. Seeing their "bits" wasn't integral to the piece. And if I'm so shallow that all I want is to watch some filth, then, let's face it, I can be home in time for Celebrity Love Island. I left Sadler's Wells feeling I had witnessed something beautiful. That feeling is available on television only if you watch Trisha.
Naked tours to the Theatre Royal, Newcastle (21-22 June), the Lighthouse, Poole (24-25 June), the Lowry, Salford (4-5 July), the Oxford Playhouse (8-9 July), the Grand Opera House, York (12-13 July), the Theatre Royal, Norwich (15-16 July) and the Birmingham Hippodrome (19-20 July). Contact the venues for more information
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