From a Moroccan beach to the Roundhouse

For all the dazzle of Collectif Acrobatique De Tangier's rough and tumble stunts, the real trick for these street performers and Aurélien Bory, the Parisian director who spotted them on a Moroccan beach, is squaring traditional acrobatics with modern theatre.

It's sometimes a tough juggling act for this second show in the Roundhouse's Circus Front season.

The opening makes much play of the removal of a headscarf worn by one of the company's two women, a heavy-handed confounding of our stereotypical expectations of Arabic culture.

The medley of mercurial slapstick and bravado that follows is pocked with weighty imagery. As the girls walk along an ever-cascading staircase of hands created by the eight men, their treetop excursion flips traditional gender roles upside down. A vast, billowing canvas is lifted and indented from below to create, with some cunning lighting, turrets, shifting dunes and possibly a huge nipple. All very cute.

But when Bory's meaningful artifice is eventually cast aside, you see what these performers are really about: flailing human pancakes are tossed high, a startled human windscreen wiper bounces repeatedly back and forth, and one man cartwheels, spinning like a whirling dervish or a plate that refuses to settle flat.

Back on the beach, the collection hat would be fat with coins.

Tomorrow and Wed, The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road NW1, 7.30pm, £15 to £20, £12 to £18 concs. Tel: 0870 389 1846. www.roundhouse.org.uk Tube: Chalk Farm

Circus Front Season: Collectif Acrobatique De Tangier: Taoub
Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road, Camden Town, NW1 8EH