Until you have pursued a pulsating 20ft leech through the underbelly of a 19th-century industrial complex you really haven't lived - or at least you've never experienced the insane magic of an IOU show. The Dean Clough-based co-operative has been promulgating its crackpot vision all over Europe for almost 25 years now. Yet Cure is the first time the company has explored its own back yard. Or should that be its own musty cellar?
The dank, vaulted warren running beneath the vast ex-carpet mill is already established as the subterranean home of Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides productions. The wonder is that it should have taken so long for IOU to scuttle underground in pursuit of its own nightmare.
IOU opt to develop the theme of a descent into illness. Cure is a distinctly queasy experience - a delirious promenade through a labyrinth of quack remedies and patent diseases, inhabited by a hollow-eyed population of mendicant patients and impatient medics where a cure is nowhere to be found. All this is articulated in IOU's inimitable style, matching Heath Robinson ergonomics to Samuel Beckett's sense of purpose. For anyone who thought the age of the dotty inventor was dead, it is a joy to witness the range of curative contraptions on offer, from the patient-frying, bicycle-driven scanning device to a ward full of swinging, singing colostomy bags.
IOU's more serious point is that there's no place weirder than a modern hospital, and nothing more destabilizing than the threat of disease. The bowels of the mill become both a surreal sanatorium and a fetid metaphor for the passages of the diseased body itself, through which the members of the audience find themselves swimming around like germs.
IOU routinely cook up visuals of such potency that the aural aspect of their work often goes underappreciated. Cure is a collaborative venture with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and the scoring of composer and founder-member Lou Glandfield - whose own recent heart surgery lurks deep within the inspiration for this project - is a thing of forlorn, fractured beauty. A band of downtrodden, dressing-gowned sufferers wield ethnic instruments to concoct their own brand of world-weary music. Only a company in rude health could produce something so sickly. Take a warm coat and comprehensive health insurance.
Further performances tonight, then from November 30 until December 2. Box office: 01484 430528
