Alain Platel has a habit of attaching frustratingly private titles to his work but with his latest production, Wolf, it is much easier to see where his jokes are coming from.
The accompanying music for the show is dominated by excerpts from Mozart - as in Wolfgang Amadeus - and among the cast are a dozen or so dogs whose collective sniffings and meanderings may not look exactly vulpine, but still give out an ancestral whiff of the pack.
This mix of the feral and the sublime runs throughout Wolf's two and a quarter hours. It is set in a rundown shopping mall, around whose graffitied steel shutters and dreary neon signs hang a crowd of drifters and deadbeats. A lonely woman in bad evening clothes shrieks out a stream of random song lyrics. A deaf man viciously hectors the crowd in sign language, and a tramp gets kicked around for stealing. The dogs who follow the tramp around mooch, scratch and snuffle regardless and for minutes at a time you feel trapped in this dazed creeped out world.
Yet these characters also embody a tatty glamour, a strident energy that gives their action a kind of irresistible carnival colour. They pass their time in trading turns - which can be startlingly hilarious (like the wannabee ballerina who dances a solo with a tiny pooch stuck down her leotard) or unexpectedly beautiful (like the bored, edgy shop assistant who suddenly turns into a reckless swooping aerialist).
All through these acts the show's band of musicians happen to be playing some of Mozart's most beautiful music, and you start realise how much Wolf is not just about a world of social derelicts but about the composer. There are qualities in Mozart's music that seem increasingly sympathetic to the mix of anarchy and courage, wit and deviancy of these characters. And if Platel is arguing that even misfits deserve a great soundtrack in their inner lives, he also seems to be extending that claim to the dogs.
There has been a lot of publicity about these dogs. In fact they are not on stage during the whole show. But we always watch out for them, and even dog haters will start to relish their odd, comic, unselfconscious doings. As for the moment on Thursday when a couple of them set about mating to Mozart's Clarinet Concerto - that puts a new spin on romance that justified the whole show.
· Until tomorrow. Box office 0870 737 7737.
