Mary Shelley’s monster. ‘Woyzeck’s test subject soldier. Prometheus. Trump and Putin’s battle to control the Arctic. The billionaire space race. Climate crisis. Nobody could accuse Akram Khan of having too few ideas in ‘Creature’, the third work to come out of his fruitful partnership with English National Ballet.
So far, his relationship with Tamara Rojo’s youthful and ambitious company has produced undisputed hits in 2014’s WW1-inspired short piece ‘Dust’ and 2016’s Olivier-winning reimagining of ‘Giselle’ as an emotive drama about migration and displacement. Perhaps it’s down to the overwhelming success of their previous collaborations that this sombre piece about man’s overreaching ambition doesn’t quite land.
The ballet begins strongly with the effervescent Jeffrey Cirio’s Creature writhing around set designer Tim Yip’s sparse, dilapidated Arctic bunker. Conscripted into a research programme ahead of mankind’s proposed colonisation of space, he is being subjected to endless physical and mental experiments designed to test his ability to withstand extreme temperatures and prolonged isolation.
His schizophrenic squirming shows that clearly, the tests are getting to him. One second he stands with his chest puffed out, grinning and smirking like a deranged strongman. The next he buckles in agony, then he’s bent double in exaggerated, slapstick laughter as his fearful minder Marie (Erina Takahashi) cowers in the shadows.
Woven into Vincenzo Lamagna’s pounding electronic soundscape, we hear glitchy excerpts of Nixon’s 1969 phone call to Apollo 11. ‘Because of what you have done,’ his voice crackles, ‘the heavens have become a part of man’s world’. Repeated ad infinitum, the congratulatory speech morphs into an ominous, biblical warning.
The problem is, after such a stirring start, ‘Creature’ starts to feel a little incoherent, buckling under all the urgent, challenging ideas that Khan tries to cram in.
We see Creature subjected to further experiments at the hands of Ken Saruhashi’s stony-faced Captain and Stina Quagebeur’s Doctor, while Fabian Reimair’s preening Major and his puppet-like army look on. And then we watch as they depart for new frontiers, leaving Creature and the unfortunate Marie behind. And yet this climactic moment falls short. The characters aren’t developed enough for us to feel all that sad about it. The humanity gets lost amongst the unrelenting bleakness of it all.
For a choreographer whose work usually conjures such a powerful emotional response, it feels like something is missing here.