Far cry from Butterfly

Madam Butterfly and The Mikado have so skewed our view of Japanese heroines that it's a surprise to learn that they don't only weep prettily and wait patiently.

Instead they get drunk, have sex, become possessed by the vengeful ghosts of dead parents, mat their hair, rage and rail, and have sickles plunged into their pregnant bellies.

At least they do in Kabuki, the supertraditional Japanese dance-theatre that gives us much rawer, more robust emotions than you get from Puccini, let alone Gilbert and Sullivan.

Paradoxically, these emotions are conveyed in a strangely doll-like style. In porcelain make-up and ornate costumes, the actors are anonymous, while the gestural language is a mystery and the music tonally alien. And yet at Sadler's Wells, the Kabuki double bill cut an erotic dash, and then to a bloody emotional chase.

In the solo Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden) the renowned Kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa XI is a love-struck lush. Sweet but impressionable, he evokes her sensual imaginings against a suggestive backdrop of an entwined wisteria and pine tree.

In Kasane, Ebizo returns as the dishonoured Samurai Yoemon, with Kamejiro Ichikawa II as the young heroine. This is a taught morality tale about how the sins of the father are not so much visited on the son, as the plight of the parent blighting the child.

Kasane loves Yoemon, and he may love her back, but years earlier he killed her step-father, ravaged her mother, and may even be her natural father.

Kasane is powerfully performed, with Kamejiro a convincingly distraught heroine, and Ebizo a man on the moral skids.

Everything about Kabuki is different, from the mime to the way the on-stage singers turn their song books "backwards" from right to left. Many will find their high-pitch falsetto like strangled cats.

However, the stylistic strangeness nudges our recognition. Beneath the starched formality, the emotional torment is our own.

Kabuki: Featuring Ebizo Ichikawa XI