The brilliant BalletBoyz delighted their audience at the New Theatre last Friday with a scintillating night of dance, marred for this reviewer at least only by its frustrating brevity at 80 minutes, including interval.

Mind you, such was the energy on display in the high-octane programme that one doubted the ability of the ten young male dancers to extend the show.

The production was entitled Life, which might have appeared contrary given that the second – and longer – of the two pieces, from Venezuelan director Javier de Frutos, is focused on a death.

The death is that of de Frutos himself, killed in a stage accident during rehearsal. This is Fiction, the title of the piece.

What follows is a demonstration that ‘the show must go on’, while the story of de Frutos’s colourful life in dance is told in an obituary written by the critic Ismene Brown and read by Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter and Derek Jacobi.

The action occurs on and around a moveable barre in the starkly lit rehearsal room, with the dancers showing their sense of loss, as well as their supreme athleticism, to a challenging original score by Ben Foskett.

The evening began with another work commissioned by the company, from Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg.

Rabbit begins with a young boy performing elegant movements beside a swing on which is seated a man wearing a rabbit head. We appear to be in a land of magic, perhaps that of Alice in Wonderland.

From beneath the surrounding drapes then appear, as if from burrows, many more men in rabbit heads, suggestive of a leporine world from which the outsider is excluded.

There is much beauty in the dance, set to Gorecki’s haunting Little Requiem for a Certain Polka. Much vigour, too. For what – in reproductive terms at least – can be more life-affirming than a rabbit?

The BalletBoyz return to the region for performances of Life at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, on June 1 (01242 572573), at the Wycombe Swan on October 31 (01494 512000) and the Hexagon, Reading, on November 19 (0118 960 6060).

Christopher Gray 4/5