Last Orders

To an extent, this bewildering new show from David Hughes Dance and Conflux's Al Seed—the team behind 2009's triumphant The Red Room—requires its audience to be familiar with the figure it uses as its inspiration, Sawney Bean. The 16th century legend, whose story is associated with incest, criminality and the death of over 1,000 people through cannibalisation, is one of the most chilling in Scottish mythical history. But even for those who do know the tale, the lack of cohesion at the centre of Last Orders makes its rhythmic routines hard to follow, resulting in a dance piece that feels, for the most part, disappointingly shallow.

It begins strongly – the mangled performers crawl out onto the stage before a lone female dancer embarks on a mesmerising knocking together of limbs. Then we're plunged into a party setting, with glitter-painted dancers and mirrors framed with multi-coloured lights denoting the hedonistic atmosphere. So far, so coked up –  but here, the production gets lost. It introduces a Billy Goats Gruff-style motif to bridge the narrative arc between the party scenes and the tale of Sawney Bean, but a few misplaced moments of humour—notably, an ensemble Macarena-style dance to Ohio Express' 'Yummy Yummy Yummy'—create an ambience of garbled mock-horror that fails to engage.

The most arresting feature of Last Orders is Guy Veale's sound design, which takes snatches of pop songs and threads them into a richly textured score with ever-changing, compelling beats. But, despite a fascinating end sequence in which Alex Rigg's Sawney Bean starts to fulfil his creepy potential, Seed's choreography sadly fails to match up to this strong musical framework.