Despite being an international success story for over twenty years, there are still many people who have never seen Stomp. The concept is simple. A bunch of guys and girls meet up cleaning up some urban ghetto workshop place. An individual starts to identify percussive rhythms in their work and plays around with those rhythms until the play becomes infectious and collaborative. I have seen Stomp before on television and at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, but these were very short exposures. My intrigue in experiencing the full show was about how the performers would keep such a simple concept entertaining for an hour and forty-five minutes.

The secret to this feat was in the sheer ingenuity of the choreography, the diversity of the routines, and the clever physical humour. Not a word was spoken during the performance. The characters were nameless industrial workers adorned in sartorial rags. Yet, they all had strong personalities. There was a peer leader, a muscle-bound gymnast, a cheeky-chappie skinny shirker, a bespectacled nerd who liked drawing on his belly, among others in the eight strong team. They worked these personae well, so that from the very beginning the audience was able to read all the attitude and expression required for the humour to work. I cannot think of any other speechless live performance of such length that was so funny from beginning to end.

Even if you have seen Stomp before, there are several companies performing the concept with their own characters and variations, so that whether one sees the regular London-based production and/or this touring one, the experience will be rather different each time. I also got the sense that no two performances would be entirely the same, as a lot of the humour was dynamics were very much in the moment.

The show is broken down into several routines. This is not just percussion and dance. There is also a lot of communication and audience participation facilitated through mime, call and response and physical theatricality. Performers dance and drum while dangling from harnesses high up in the stage scaffolding, they whiz across in shopping trolleys, and they synchronise brilliantly. My favourite routine was when all eight performers simultaneously juggled paint tins of various sizes between themselves while continuing to keep up the driving tempo of dance and percussion. This was brilliant spectacle, and although it looked random, I have no doubt that behind the slick moves were countless highly disciplined and ultra-tight rehearsals.

The audience were made up of ages from about six to over sixty-six, and the show can genuinely claim to be suitable for families. There was one mild phallic innuendo, but it was subtle and unlikely to be understood by children. The only reservation I have is that there is no interval, so if you are thinking of taking children make sure they take a comfort break before the start.

All-in-all this is a great show full of tremendous energy, creativity, originality and highly innovative ways to bang out a beat. However, by the end I was feeling a little jaded by the noise bombardment, and as good as it was, I was glad the rhythmic drive had run its course. The performers did extremely well to entertain so well for the full hour and forty-five minutes, but any longer would have been too long.     ★★★★☆     Robert Gainer   30^th May 2018