Director Aurélien Bory first spotted the cast of Taoub training on a beach in Tangier, and such is the charm of this intimate little circus show that you almost believe its performers never really left home. The 12 acrobats, who range in years from adolescence to late middle age, occupy the stage with the unhurried, dreamy style of people simply enjoying themselves. None has the practised expression or slick demeanour of a trained theatre person.
Yet it takes only five minutes for these performers to prove that they are the business. With an insouciant brilliance, they fill the stage with multiple backflips, dizzying cartwheels, perilous human pyramids and vaulting trampoline stunts. What's doubly exciting is that they do it with so little technology. Most of the music comes from their own singing and playing, and their equipment couldn't be more basic. Even the trampoline is handheld, so that when one of the acrobats is hurtling through space, the others are having to run across the stage in order to catch them as they descend.
It's terrifying to watch. But the performers' daring is beautifully framed by the visual fantasies with which Bory, as director, has packaged parts of the show. During some of the routines, surreal, unexpected images are projected on to the acrobats' bodies, dramatically rewriting the moment. As a woman clambers across a bridge formed by the crossed hands of her colleagues, pictures of the Tangier sea-front ripple over the supporters' white tunics, turning her act into a Spiderwoman stunt. Hallucinogenic desert landscapes are created by manipulating a huge swathe of fabric, and simple changes of lighting work extraordinary transformations, so that a whirling dervish dance ends up being performed by giant shadows - flickering dream devils.
I started out wondering if Taoub would be a little slow, a little strange for some of its very young audience. But everyone was spellbound.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0870-3800 400.
