Hospital can severely damage your health, according to choreographer Jasmin Vardimon. Her new work, Lullaby, is a darkly disturbing game of doctors and nurses in which she gets out the scalpel and slices away at people's relationships with illness.
From the stream of invective delivered by the swearing baby figure of the prologue, you know you're in for some tough treatment. Vardimon creates a war zone, with medics battling disease (and each other) with a knife in a wry swipe at hospital hierarchy. She then probes into even darker recesses, looking at the vulnerability of the sick and the abuse of patients.
Vardimon's combative, punishing physical moves combine with text and novel video technology. One of the cast of five wears a tiny camera, giving us a dancer's-eye view of the action. The vocabulary of the dance is bizarre and exaggerated: the nurses are slapped around like sides of meat, bodies crashing and falling.
One high point is the brilliant duo for Mafalda Deville and Gavin Liam Rees, plus a pillow, that makes all-in wrestling look tame. As the doctor talks about treatment, the disease continues to attack, only to be flung, grabbed by the neck and rocketed around the stage. In contrast, Vardimon appears in her crisp white coat, body equally starched. In a surreal trio, she is lifted up, horizontally rigid; you half expect a magician to appear and pass a hoop over her body. Lullaby touches on the fears and anxieties of childbirth; the pain of losing loved ones; the high-handedness of consultants - Duggan's fawning nurse becomes a table for the boss - and the dread of the waiting room.
Light breaks with some incredible percussion from Hofesh Shechter. Later, the nurses calypso in a mooning line-up of bum-cleavage. There's a fun quartet with walking frames and some tender, lyrical moments as partners cope with impending death. Vardimon is a powerful voice in physical theatre, and the daring movements she creates here leave scars on the memory. You can almost smell the disinfectant.
· At the Arts Complex, Solihull, on Thursday. Box office: 0121-704 6962. Then touring.
