The inaugural winner of the Evening Standard’s Beyond Theatre prize has been rejigged since its premiere a year ago. One thing that hasn’t changed is the quality that this collaboration between The Pet Shop Boys and choreographer Javier De Frutos shares with some of the best fairytales — that of a sense of wonder being wielded with the precision of a surgical instrument.
Hans Christian Andersen’s fable about a king who promises his daughter and half his kingdom to anyone who creates The Most Incredible Thing is given a knowingly sardonic makeover by De Frutos. The winning device — a magical clock that produces different biblical and allegorical figures when it strikes the hours — becomes a much more rarefied entertainment: at seven, for instance, the deadly sins drape themselves over a red velour barre like the Hey, Big Spender! whores from Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity (except here some of them are men, and need a shave).
Although the references to other choreographers fly past, the clockwork motif is a constant. The workers being ground beneath the heel of Ivan Putrov’s jackbooted commissar, with their right-angled elbows and nordic-skier feet, could be marching to the sound of mechanical cuckoos. When Clemmie Sveeas’s Princess loses her inhibitions, it appears at first as a localised explosion, like a shoulder or a hip unsprung. It must be love when she meets Aaron Sillis’s bespectacled visionary, Leonardo, because for the first time she melts from head to toe.
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s score ranges from electronic bells to symphonic rhapsody, and the design team of Katrina Lindsay, Tal Rosner and Lucy Carter produce a dystopia that almost thrills the eye enough to make you forget it’s meant to crush the spirit.
Until April 7 (0844 412 4300, sadlerswells.com)
