Violetta, the dying heroine of Verdi's La Traviata, is the perfect character with which to open Dreamdances, the new show in which Lindsay Kemp casts an eye on his own career. Even though Violetta is a new face in Kemp's gallery of monsters and eccentrics, she is vintage stuff - a mix of Gloria Swanson, Miss Havisham and Maria Callas played in Kemp's inimitable style of grande dame camp.
At 63, Kemp is on fine physical form. With his plump shoulders rising bare and powdered from a white crinolined gown he makes an exquisite entrance, his trademark hallucinatory walk paced to a beautiful, cracked recording of the opera. In the little sketch that follows, Violetta's wide dreamy gaze, fluttering courtesan gestures and little crises of nerves and ecstasy recast her from opera diva to classic Kemp paradox: a creature both man and woman, naive and arch, hopeful and bruised, imperious and slightly soiled.
Dreamdances - a show more basic than the storytelling spectacles of the 1980s and 90s - consists of 10 short solos or duets divided between Kemp and his two long-standing collaborators, Nuria Moreno and Marco Berriel. Each vignette is animated by some extremity of love or madness, and in that sense it makes for an odd evening as we bump from one climax to another, some distinctly less riveting than others. The material created by Moreno and Berriel is generally the weakest, although as performers they are expert. Moreno's brittle marionette's face and body can distil comic dementia like no other performer, while Berriel as the company's straight man is a divine dancer, the bullish strength of his upper body refined by a rare musicality and grace.
Kemp's own material can also be patchy (especially his old solo Salome), but as Nijinsky and a Lois Fuller- inspired Angel he is transformed. It's not just the eloquence of his presence - mad Nijinsky staring into his addled memories as musical remnants of his ballets wheeze through his head like a dying clock - it's also the power of his staging.
Compared with modern computer effects, Kemp's box of tricks might seem quaint - strobe lighting, snowstorms of feathers, dancers flying in harnesses - but he is such an old hand that he can manipulate them into a kind of atavistic magic. The sight of Kemp as the Angel floating on wings of light-filled silk to the music of Verdi's Requiem certainly won't convert those who dismiss him as a tacky old queen. But to those who find a fluky genius in his uninhibited fun, in his canny craft and his capacity to turn base theatrical cliche into gold, it is a perfect moment.
· Until February 9. Box office: 020-7863 8222.
