When Theseus entered the labyrinth, he met a bull-headed monster, slavering for flesh. No minotaur lurks in Margate’s Winter Gardens, a dilapidated pleasure palace, however. Instead, we make our way past memories of the fallen heroes of light entertainment (Max Bygraves, Cannon and Ball) and into Jasmin Vardimon’s immersive dance piece.
The environment, designed by artist Ron Arad, is enthralling. Off-white industrial foam makes an uncanny building material. Cut surfaces loom like walls of snow or rock. Light gloams faintly within. You can bounce off it, subside into it. When a beckoning dancer leads me onto a foam slab, my foot sinks into it, leaving me briefly stranded.
It’s perfect for carving out corridors and crevices, peepholes and caverns. A tiny room in the labyrinth, lit by a swaying lantern, includes a copy of The Last Jews of Kerala, as if an entire tribe has abandoned the maze.
The mystery is all in the space. Vardimon’s dancers – her expressive professionals are joined by students from her JV2 student company – clamber over foam walls, performing panting rituals on tree stumps. Several bereft characters recur. A lovelorn woman pursues the joker who abandons her headfirst into a block of foam or cackles as a wall swallows her up. Another woman traces pen lines like black veins over her body, before expiring upside down. (The family-friendly daytime version of Maze probably deletes the couple snogging in their pants.)
These vignettes are eager but coarse – lumbering drama exercises rather than the disorienting Cocteauesque myth that was Vardimon’s inspiration. We demystify the maze too, smiling politely as we pass, puttering around in our socks. “Oh, hello again,” chirruped a sprightly chap to a ringleted siren. Theseus grasped a scarlet thread to trace his way back through the maze. In Margate, smiling dancers lead us out in a stumbling waltz: charmed, perhaps, but unchanged.
• Until 15 April. Box office: 01843 292795. Venue: Margate Winter Gardens.
