Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre scored a hit at the Barbican in 2005 with a gutsy, darkly comic and singularly unorthodox rethink of the classical ballet staple Giselle. The young Irish company now enjoys a firm and fruitful relationship with the London venue. Early next year audiences will see The Bull, a Barbican co-commission based on an Irish literary epic, to be followed by a new show in 2008.

In the meantime there is The Flowerbed, a reworking of a 2000 production that features some of the most un-neighbourly people you could ever hope not to have to live beside. With Romeo and Juliet as a loose template, the director Michael Keegan-Dolan serves up a sordid domestic war in a stylised, stripped-down suburban setting. A family of chain-smoking, beer-swilling slobs moves in to a simple dwelling stage right. Opposite live a couple of neurotic, uptight clean freaks. About all the two households have in common is that the adults in each pop pills, whether for sleeping or feeling better. Despite this unsalubrious environment, sweetly tentative feelings blossom between Daphne Strothmann’s Juliet and Rachel Poirier’s convincingly boyish Romeo.

Keegan-Dolan, who works extensively in opera, could be labelled Matthew Bourne’s thematically raw Hibernian cousin. His seven sharp actor-dancers specialise in outlandish caricature. Mrs Capulet, for want of a better moniker, is played by swarthy Vladislav Benito Sóltys in a curly wig, heels, various vulgar frocks and, briefly, a two-piece swimsuit. The latter is not a pretty sight, but the performer himself is broadly funny. Mr Montague (Michael

M. Dolan) executes a fetishistic adagio duet with a shiny red mower before waxing intimate with his beloved lawn.

Keegan-Dolan’s sometimes deliberately crude, kinetic cartoon vision of human nature swings between cruelty and ridiculousness. Satirical ironies are cleverly and amusingly underlined, while subtlety is traded in for strong characterisations and sure theatrical choices.

Given the show’s source in Shakespearean tragedy, there is a climactic glut of carefully choreographed violence. Young love cannot survive the spiritual wretchedness from which it springs. Bleak? You bet. But it is also vivid and engrossing.

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