Time for Akram Khan to move on from climate-change choreography

It must be 20 years since I first saw Akram Khan dance, and I will never forget the impression he made in a brief impassioned solo; here was a master of the Indian kathak school who had seen how its traditional vocabulary could be related to the less constricted realms of modernism. Since then he has gone on to fulfil his promise and broaden his aesthetic, notably through his extraordinarily powerful Giselle for English National Ballet. At 48, he has virtually retired from performing, but he continues to choreograph and direct his own company, enjoying a considerable international reputation.

Most recently he’s homed in on an environmental agenda and I’m ambivalent about the results. Creature was first staged by ENB in 2021, when it drew generally negative reviews. Eighteen months later it has returned to more positive acclaim, but it still fails at the level of narrative, not least because what one sees on stage bears such scant relationship to the synopsis in the programme.

Drawing on the archetypes of Frankenstein’s monster and the victimised soldier Woyzeck, it depicts the interior of some sort of polar research station where the eponymous freakish outsider has been conscripted as a guinea pig for a dastardly experiment with extreme cold. Creature is in love with his keeper Marie, but he is at the mercy of a brutal camp commandant who has his own designs on her. An apocalyptic collapse ensues, but it’s not clear to me what specifically causes it.

A fiercely pounding score by Vincenzo Lamagna and an impressively austere design concept by Tim Yip contribute to a richly sinister atmosphere, which Khan furnishes with some menacing, if predictable, fascistic parades for the proles and drones. If only there wasn’t so much empty repetition and a bewildering succession of pointless exits and entrances.