Now, I admit to a prejudice of my own here. Not against gay people I hasten to add, but against theatre that, no matter how well-meaning, only reinforces the views of its audience. What is the point of a production promoting the message that homophobia is a bad thing to a National Theatre audience made up mostly of nice, tolerant liberal types?
Yet what makes this show worth its stage time is not the dancing, wonderful though much of it is, especially Ankur Bahl's persecuted rope-skipping Muslim, nor the technical brilliance of Lloyd Newson's production in which performers interact with video projections often to stunning effect, but its politics which draw the battle lines between societies who persecute gays and those who protect them.
This is a show that does not shirk from identifying Islam, not all of it fundamentalist, as the main source of gay hatred in this country and much of the world. In the scene where a dancer spins a digitally drawn globe that highlights great swathes of the planet as being ruled by laws threatening the life and liberty of gay people, including "all of the Middle East, except Israel", a lesson becomes clear - that freedom of expression, religion and gay rights are so closely linked that it is probably no exaggeration to say that a society should be judged by how it treats its gays. (Tel: 020 7 452 3000)
