Early on in Gumboots there was a moment when I wondered how director Zenzi Mbuli would reconcile the gap between his performers' shiningly upbeat energy and the dark hell-holes from which their material was born.
The songs and dances generically styled as gumboots (or isicathulo) date back to the late 19th century, when workers in South African gold mines were forced to labour for three months at a time, wearing gumboots to navigate the flooded, disease-ridden tunnels in which they worked. Talking was banned - but the workers found their own forms of communication by slapping out conversational rhythms on their boots, rattling their ankle chains and chanting.
Mbuli's show recreates these conditions on a stage crowded with pulleys, ropes and planks, and lit with a sulphurous glow. Its cast of 12 are stripped to the waist, but the sweat that gleams from their torsos is not caused by hard labour but by the pace of their nonstop stream of song, dance and banter.
The dance itself looks like a loose, muscular cousin of Riverdance - the energy focused on fast percussive footwork, counterpointed by a lithe upswing of the leg. But it's textured with layer upon layer of slapping, chanting, drumming and singing. There are maudlin drunk songs, love songs, protest songs, even an outrageous disco version from the 1970s, headed by the line "I'm too sexy for my boots."
The performances are all irresistibly slick, irresistibly larky yet Mbuli's greatest triumph in this show is the adroit way in which he increasingly draws back from pure showbiz to remind us of his material's dark history. In some of the songs, the rhythms of industrial machinery sound harshly through the folk material.
And as if to underscore these, the show opens with a homage to Nelson Mandela and ends with a sombre paeon to the many thousands who died in South Africa's mines. Gumboots comes out, amazingly, flourishing both feel-good factor and political gravitas.
· Until July 10. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
