For their 10th anniversary production, CoisCeim Dance Theatre draws from ETA Hoffmann's story to create an updated, sexualised and un-Christmassy Nutcracker. Clara (Lisa McLoughlin) is not a rich little girl but an office worker who discovers her inner ballerina through the interventions of her guardian angel, Drosselmeier (the great Irish actor Tom Hickey). The Sugar Plum Fairy is a bad witch here: the snooty boss sexually intimidating the male employee who eventually becomes Clara's nutcracker prince (Robert Jackson).
The company of nine dancers first acts out stylised scenes of office drudgery, then gradually transforms into figures in Clara's imagined world, dancing on and around Joe Vanek's versatile set of desks, chairs, and shelving units on wheels.
Choreographer David Bolger's work always teeters on the creative edge between engaging inventiveness and cloying whimsy, and that ambiguity is fully at play here. It's refreshing to see a sacred cow approached with such irreverence, but the basic premise - office workers with repressed emotional and imaginative lives - feels dated and a bit contrived.
At its best, the production gives the sense of invention happening close to the surface, as with the dancers' transformation into mice by holding pointy paper cups in their teeth, and Clara's seeming to conjure the recorded Tchaikovsky score by tapping out the familiar rhythm on her typewriter. The dance passages, particularly McLoughlin's and Jackson's sensuous pas de deux, are engaging and well-performed.
An unnecessary interval interrupts the narrative flow, however, and on opening night an overused fog machine obscured some of the most interesting dance passages. One wishes also that some kind of through-line could be traced in Hickey's interventions: though he performs with conviction, one leaves unsure what to make of his somewhat comic, somewhat sinister presence in Clara's life.
· Until January 22. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613. Then touring.
