The one fierce, implacable reason for seeing 5 Women 5 is its star, Eva Yerbabuena. Small, round and deceptively mild-faced, Yerbabuena has a technique explosive and intelligent enough to fill the stage. The reason not to get too excited is that for this show she has tangled herself up in a style of theatrical rhetoric that takes her talent dangerously close to whimsy and self-importance.
5 Women 5 presents itself as a kind of flamenco guidebook to the female psyche, following Yerbabuena on a journey through changing states of love, ambition, solitude and madness. The most convincing and interesting thing about this journey is the core of self-containment Yerbabuena carries with her. Her style subdues the tempestuous extremes of the discipline into dancing of pared-down purity and intent, and in doing so intensifies its drama. The flick of a wrist - sharp as a whip-crack - becomes an expression of fine arrogance, the flickering of Yerbabuena's fingers a delicate sensual fantasy. The subtly modulating rhythms of her footwork - sustained across an epic range - narrate their own stories of survival, change, love and loss.
Yerbabuena is also an astute, imaginative choreographer and some of the dances she creates for the rest of her ensemble provide a dramatic framework and emotional amplification for her own journey. She is expert at heightening individual moves so they become gestures of alienation or community, and at orchestrating visual and musical patterns in a group. But, fatally, Yerbabuena doesn't trust the dancing to carry the message in this show. Far too regularly she signposts the progress of her persona with crude body language, tormented expressions and the self-consciously tragic interruptions of a woman singer.
Yerbabuena is one of the most refined and articulate of flamenco artists, which makes it doubly dispiriting that she should resort to such an anxious mugging of her art-form's soul.
· Until tomorrow. Box office: 0870 737 7737.
