It's not surprising that The Soldier's Tale is rarely performed in full. While the haunting, hellish harmonies and spiked rhythms of its score are vintage Stravinsky, CR Ramuz's wordy narrative (about a soldier who sells his soul to the devil) makes for a slow and stolid piece of music theatre. Will Tuckett, however, seems to have been actively inspired by the work's flaws, creating a production that allows every member of his team to fly.
Tuckett has set the story in a music hall, giving us a moral tale turned tacky entertainment. Designer Lez Brotherston transforms The Linbury into a fin de siècle dive, complete with age-spotted mirrors, brass, and garish drop curtain. The "performers", too, are all a little bit rancid and a little bit flash - and you can almost see the excess hair cream fly off Will Kemp as he swoops garrulously around the stage as the narrator/ Master of Ceremonies.
Kemp, a wonderful mover with a film career beckoning, is teamed with three superb dancers, and Tuckett's choreography doesn't short-change their talents. Adam Cooper as the Soldier deftly nuances a stream of period details (hints of Fokine and Nijinsky) into dancing that is alternately blustering and touchingly heroic. Zenaida Yanowsky as the temptress-Princess is a glamorous hysteric, recklessly and vaingloriously pirouetting around the confined stage and preening luridly for the Soldier's benefit.
But these performers can act as well as they can dance - and as they flip from steps to words, they do as much as is humanly possible to add verve and colour to the text. Best of all is Matthew Hart's Devil, who is truthfully the scariest thing I've seen outside of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In his first incarnation as a sinister old tramp, he assumes an unctuous, revolting glitter, licking the Soldier's violin in acquisitive lust and offering wheedling promises of wealth. As the card-playing dandy who pimps the Princess, he is drawlingly, greasily malign; and, as the Devil-with-horns, he is all over the stage, his limbs electric with unstoppable energy as he tumbles the Soldier down to hell. Hart's dancing and his delivery are both superb, and it's a tribute to Tuckett as well as his own talent that this is the performance of his career.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
