Ohad Naharin has refused to give any clues as to why he titled his 2001 piece Naharin's Virus, but some of us in the audience might diagnose the bug for him. This a production infected with a chronic, debilitating condition, whose symptoms veer between sporadic fever and theatrical exhaustion.
Dominating - or rather blanketing - the evening is the performance of Offending the Audience, a text written by radical playwright Peter Hanke in 1966. A studiedly neutral actor delivers a studiedly bland harangue in which he repeatedly denies the existence of plot, message, characters or political intent in the production around him. To hammer home his point, Naharin's 15 other dancers, dressed in uniformly dour beige and black, pass much of the work's 70 minutes executing remote, self-effacing moves in unremarkable patterns around the stage.
Yet in the spaces between these distancing devices, Naharin delivers some big gestures. As an Israeli artist and an outspoken critic of his government's policy, Naharin has made a decision with political resonance in his inclusion of Arabic music in the work's accompanying score. In case anyone misses the point, his dancers spray-paint the word Palestine (for some reason deliberately misspelt) all over the back wall of the stage. And at odd moments in the performance, they spread out in confrontational formation: their limbs jerking, their mouths screaming incoherent abuse.
Many of the men and women in this company must have been involved in military service, and there is nothing accidental in the way this image mimics the front line of the intifada. Naharin's inclusion of other emotive touches - the sound of church bells, a snatch from Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings - also underline our sense that real rage and sadness are fuelling this work.
But the production goes to such lengths to hedge these forces in, to deny, deflect or deconstruct them, that there is nowhere for the material to go. We may admire Naharin's fastidiousness, his unwillingness to indulge in crude polemic. But so rigorously does he want to have his political cake and not eat it that we all end up hungry.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
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