Nadia Beugré, L'Homme rare Review ★★★★★

The blurb for Nadia Beugré’s L’Homme rare, which ran at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of this year’s London International Festival of Theatre, LIFT, is worth quoting at length:

‘The issue of gender has always featured in Nadia Beugré’s work, but in L’Homme rare she tackles it head-on, questioning the attention paid to bodies and the qualities attributed to their movements.

‘Starting with a game that blurs perceptions of gender, the choreographer places the spectator in the position of a voyeur, inviting the audience to experience her research on our understanding of the body, particularly black and male, in history and today.’

Voyeur, maybe. It’s hard not to feel as one, when five naked men cavort on a semi-lit stage with their backs to the audience for the best part of one hour, inviting us to fixate on their buttocks, just as they themselves seem fixated on them.

However, as for their display embodying the results of the choreographer’s research, that’s more problematic. Sure, you can’t help passing judgement on the aesthetic, though strangely asexual, qualities of those backsides. It’s impossible not to notice that three black performers’ bodies show statuesque perfection, while those of the two light-skinned men, one white, one Lebanese, show all too human imperfection – whether by accident or design is unclear. Possibly by design, as the final part of the blurb reads: ‘L’Homme rare also acts as a reflection on the history of Europeans’ gaze on black bodies and its persistence today.’

Beyond that, though, there’s little the fixation on buttocks can communicate, and the show soon becomes quite boring in its uniformity, despite the fleeting moments of beauty created by rare sedate alignments of bodies reminiscent of Greco-roman group statuary.

It all started with a bit of crowd-warming, the adrenaline-fuelled performers (fully dressed) jumping among the audience and inviting people to come on stage and bop along to a blast of African rock music.

It ended with Beugré herself, her naked breasts barely covered by long dreadlocks, playing an eerie air on a mouth organ while she climbs onto the stage to join the men.

Gags in between included Frenchman Lucas Nicot galumphing around the stage wearing bright red high-heeled platform shoes and falling heavily three times; the shoes will later double as a hat and a cod-piece for another performer.

All rather bemusing and strangely uninvolving – not entirely pointless, but to me falling far short of its promise.