Danse macabre

He sits and waits. Does an angel contemplate his fate? You either love that song or loathe it but Robbie Williams's anthem is the soundtrack for a generation, an Our Tune wedding smoocher par excellence.

Now strip that line of its sickly sentimentality and place it in the mind of a disturbed man in a London pub with a sports bag stuffed full of explosives.

A tearjerker lyric is turned to terror in a heartbeat as the world spins upside down before our eyes.

That's the trick that Stan Won't Dance, the trading name of physical theatre duo Liam Steel and Robert Tannion, pull off in Sinner, a debut show so strong it's catapulted them to the front rank of British performers inside a year.

Not that that should come as a surprise. Steel and Tannion both cut their teeth with DV8, the most influential force in British dance over the past two decades - and you can feel that influence in Sinner, a show hewn from the cloth of popular culture.

Based on events surrounding the Soho pub bombing in 1999, which claimed three lives, Sinner is direct and emotionally powerful in a way that dance rarely dares to be. It's proof positive of Steel and Tannion's commitment to making work that connects directly with the audience.

To that end, they've rewritten the rule book and taken on the challenge of uniting movement with dialogue in an entirely new way. Working with writer Ben Payne, they've integrated the two forms in a realistic way that's a technical tour de force. Unfortunately for them, they make it look easy.

'It's really difficult to do text and movement because they use the same side of the brain,' says Steel. 'But the best compliment we've had is that we make it look natural. The real difficulty is learning how to get the words and the moves to gel. You have to have the words ingrained in your body to make it work.'

What drew the pair together was a nagging feeling that dance had turned its back on real issues. 'In dance, it's always like working with a blank page, drawing stuff out of your own experience,' says Tannion. 'But we want to tell other stories - though, of course, you still put a large part of yourself into the character.'

Which, given Sinner's tale of a pub flirtation subtly shifting into something much more sinister, proved an emotional journey.