Dance of death

Sex and death. Death and sex. The two have always gone together, although 20th century medicine made us think we could keep them apart. That all changed with Aids, especially in sub-Sahara Africa where medicines and attitudes can be very different from those in the West.

What, you're probably wondering, has all that to do with Robyn Orlin's cryptically titled performance piece We Must Eat Our Suckers With The Wrapper On? Well, quite a lot. The South African choreographer depicts the chaos of death from Aids, and its connection with sex, in very direct terms.

Not for her the pretty death and tidy tears you get in most theatre. Instead, it's full-on mayhem, with 13 performers running, screaming, writhing and crawling around the stage. Sex and its pleasure are portrayed, as are the devil-may-care attitudes of those in their death throes.

Sometimes the two are depicted together - the bereaved and dying seeking their final physical consolations.

In one scene a man portrays a woman whose husband and son have died, while she has just three months to live. That doesn't stop her going out for some fun, she says, as she unwraps lollipops from their cellophane wrappers and sucks seductively.

A cameraman records the chaos, relaying enlarged black and white fragments onto the screen that wraps around the back and two sides of the stage.

There's also an overhead camera that tracks detail - a woman's inner thighs, her bottom, and the moment when she's injected with a medicine that doesn't seem to work.

We Must Eat ... sometimes feels like a community education drama, surely an intentional jab at the belated efforts of many governments to tell people about safe sex and Aids. However, the approach is not entirely

successful. Sometimes it's just gratuitous, such as when a man unwraps a banana to demonstrate how you... Well, you get the picture. At others, it looks like a substitute for properly thought-out drama.

Orlin sends her performers into the audience too often, and when she needs a group dance she gets them to run around in African robes with blown up condoms on their heads.

This may actually happen in some parts of Africa, but pasting it into a drama for the European stage looks lazy. At other, times, the humour is just too coarse.

Happily, the performers rise above it, chanting, dancing and speaking with considerable dignity. They're also a dab hand with the props. Red handleless buckets become drums and seats, and two rubbed inside of each other depict the sexual act. At the close the buckets are placed over a light bulb and become the glowing, low-set sun on the African horizon.