Seven Sisters Group make a living out of winkling the secrets from unlikely performance venues such as train stations, department stores and, in their new piece Forbidden, the Opera House's Clore Studio. Admittedly, this is a small theatre by night, but by day it's one of the airy, modern rooms in which the Royal Ballet rehearses its repertoire. And given the traditional role played by fairy-tale classics in that repertoire, it's no surprise that the mission of Forbidden should be to worm out the dark places, the dangerous subplots of fairy stories.
The group's ability to transform a place is impressive. Going into the Clore, you enter a disconcertingly murky maze of narrow, crooked paths, the forbidden forest of magical narrative. A low, twiggy roof intensifies the claustrophobia; flashes of light and rumblings of electronic music pitch a note of panic. As you adjust to the gloom you see large holes ripped in the walls of the maze. Peering through, you lock eyes with another startled punter or spot one of the seven dancers acting out the enchantments and destinies of their various characters. One witchy-faced woman invites you into her kitchen to hear her stories - disconnected, violent ramblings with no happy endings. Another character, half-woman, half-cat, seductively invites you to touch her fur. Yet another spins round in a scarlet cloth, suspended within a large scaffold tower. In a piece that is, unsurprisingly, full of sex, you don't have time to pursue this mix of erotic metaphors. There are random couplings between girls and woodcutters, a woman slavering over a sharp knife, and a character who describes her nocturnal encounter with a man whose hair grows on the inside of his body.
For much of the time there's a simple, wide-eyed pleasure to be had from wandering through the piece and discovering its elements at random. The visuals are good, and the performers engaged - I liked the fact that it's hard to figure out how many there are until the concluding dance brings them all together.
But Forbidden is not as richly transgressive or as strange as it first appears. The characters' stories and riddles are not particularly well written or arrestingly delivered, and the ideas and symbols explored are predictable and ultimately insubstantial. After a while the event starts to feel like one of those "historic" villages, in which actors dressed in hessian speak olde English and bake bread in holes in the ground for the edification of the paying public - however thoroughly drilled the performers, they rarely make us feel that we have landed up in another world. So it is with Forbidden. The transformation into fairy tale is fun, but little more than prop and costume-deep.
