Sheer brutal beauty

Squeaky clean and with a prim new glass-and-steel bustle after its £30 million refurbishment, the Roundhouse - former site of 1850s steam-engine repairs and 1960s artistic excess - needed something to dirty it down again.

Luckily it's got Fuerzabruta, aka 'brute force'. This new show from two members of bonkers Argentinian troupe De La Guarda is a sensual and sensory onslaught, a series of ravishing images that barge their way into the milling audience accompanied by hardcore trance music and a fine spray of mist and rubble.

What's it about? It's about 60 minutes of unalloyed pleasure. The alternate-visions of bliss and alienation peddled by Fuerzabruta are, admittedly, simple to the point of banality. It's the scope and flair of their execution that delights, and the democratic nature of the experience.

Last night, guests including Ewan McGregor, Steven Berkoff, Helen Mirren, Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Miller and Sadie Frost were all barged out of the way along with us plebs as a vast mobile treadmill was shoved into the audience, bearing a man running for his life.

Furniture and figures placed on the treadmill zip past this harassed everyman and topple off the end. Bullets and driving rain do not stop him, and he smashes through the doors and walls that speed towards him.

This audacious inversion of the laws of physics, however, is trumped by the aerobatic wire-work that follows.

Two women scamper along a silver curtain, heedless of gravity. We see a man stuck to the underside of a translucent bed filled with water, trying to match his lover's sleepy, thrashing movements inside it.

Later, this pair bump frantically against opposite sides of a huge, wavering silver disk, like flies on flypaper.

Between set-pieces, the cast stamp, shout, smash things and shove through the crowd. It's exhilarating, if a bit laden with posturing and attitude. None of it, though, prepares you for the sheer beauty of the crowning sequence.

A vast, translucent plastic water tank, lit from above, is tipped slowly from side to side, and four moist nymphs splash and gambol in the resulting tidal surf. Slowly, the tank descends until the audience, palms up, can touch its pliable underside and feel the bodies slithering like seals above.