Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Tango Fire, The Peacock, London: A stripped-down spectacular

In a crowded field, German Cornejo’s troupe is one of the most popular touring tango companies

Wednesday 30 January 2019 12:51 GMT

German Cornejo and Gisela Galeassi in ‘Tango Fire’ (Oliver Neubert)

Tango Fire is a feast of tango. Led by choreographer and Argentine tango champion German Cornejo and his partner Gisela Galeassi, it’s a stripped-down spectacular: six couples, musicians Quarteto Fuego playing live on stage, and a parade of seductive show dances.

In a crowded field, Cornejo’s troupe is one of the most popular touring tango companies: this is Tango Fire’s seventh London season, due to popular demand. It’s easy to see why. Feet flash so fast your eye can barely keep up, legs flicking and intertwining with intricate, teasing speed. Dancers dip into deep backbends and deeper lunges, wind around each other, clash or melt.

Cornejo’s production feels both luxurious and no-frills. The clothes are glamorous, the stage bare: it’s all about the dancing. There are some group numbers, a hint of scene-setting, but the duets are the heart of the show. Each couple is given a chance to shine, each with their own personality. The first half suggests tango in social settings, as if the dancers were gathering at a bar, trying out steps and flirting. The second ramps up the performance: more lifts, more acrobatics.

Cornejo and Galeassi combine silken line with phenomenally strong partnering. They’re tango all-rounders: the high-speed footwork never becomes hectic, and they share a powerful onstage glamour. When it comes to the lifts, Cornejo whirls Galeassi as if she were a lasso, her body swinging and curling in the air, both daring and utterly at ease.

I loved Ezequiel Lopez and Camila Alegre, who combine tight, sharp footwork with a voluptuous breadth of movement. In an evening of show tango, they find a particular intimacy – they’re the closest to the spontaneous, improvised quality of social dance. Even their most theatrical numbers have a sense of give and take, shared breath and grand display.

The best theatre of 2018

Show all 10

1/10The best theatre of 2018

The best theatre of 2018

10. Girls & Boys, Royal Court

One of those plays that had you staggering slightly as you left the stalls. This one-woman show was performed with amusing self-possession and fierce grace by Carey Mulligan, as a woman recounting how she met her husband, and how they navigated her more successful career and having a family. Dennis Kelly’s play began deceptively light and funny, but its snark turned to harrowing tragedy via a twist that left you winded – and delivered a howl against the conditioned violence of men. Designer Es Devlin’s painterly approach to light and colour was perfect and also paid painful dividends.

Marc Brenner

The best theatre of 2018

9. Fun Home, Young Vic

This American musical was keenly awaited – and didn’t disappoint. An adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel about her in-the-closet father who ran a funeral home, and her own journey towards coming out, it felt important to see such a story onstage – and was so very beautifully told, with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music Jeanine Tesori (who also scored the terrific musical Caroline, or Change, which stormed London in 2018 too after opening in Chichester last year). Although the show doesn’t totally burn in the memory, Zubin Varla was magnificent as the father, and Eleanor Kane’s song of sexual discovery and first love – “Changing My Major” (to Joan) – was one of my favourite moments of the year.

Marc Brenner

The best theatre of 2018

8. Dance Nation, The Almeida

By American writer Clare Barron (pictured), this play followed a group of teenage dancers, with their earnest dreams, petty rivalries, and general angst. Sounds like a bad TV series… but it was so, so much more. Barron had these girls discovering their power. Power they’re thrilled by; power they’re afraid of. A slippery beast, the play flirted with the supernatural and the mythical in its depiction of the transformation of puberty. Among a strong cast of adults making no attempt to disguise their adulthood, Ria Zmitrowicz was especially memorable as Zuzu.

Almeida

The best theatre of 2018

7. Company, Gielgud Theatre

I spend more reviews than I’d like moaning about old-fashioned musical revivals that fail to tackle #problematic material. Stephen Sondheim’s musical about Bobby, whose friends harp on at him to get married, could have been one – but Marianne Elliott unlocked it with a smart, coherent approach to gender-swapped casting. Bobbie as a woman in her mid-thirties made a lot of sense, as did the switcheroos in several other couples, which gave a fresh fillip to the show’s meandering investigation of relationships. The score sounded divine, Rosalie Craig was a glinting Bobbie, and “Getting Married Today” had me actually breathless with laughter.

Brinkhoff Mogenburg

The best theatre of 2018

6. Sweat, Donmar Warehouse

A late addition: Sweat has just opened, although after rave reviews tickets are in short supply – catch it if you can before 26 January. Lynn Nottage’s play – about factory workers in Pennsylvania whose friendships and families fracture when job losses loom – was always likely to be good; it won a Pulitzer, after all. But Lynette Linton’s production was ferociously good. Plumbing the emotional depths of Nottage’s heart-breaking story, it had fine, firmly controlled performances and a terrific set by Frankie Bradshaw. And while this incredibly empathetic play has plenty to tell us about blue-collar America, it couldn’t have struck harder in Brexit Britain either.

Johan Persson

The best theatre of 2018

5. Misty, The Bush/Trafalgar Studies

A game-changer, this show built up a thrilling momentum, galvanising audiences and transferring to the West End, allowing us to kick once and for all the bone-headed notion that there isn’t an audience for “black plays” into the long grass. And how: Arinze Kene’s piece of gig-theatre explored and exploded exactly the notion of a “black play”, with the mesmerising Kene playing himself as a writer struggling to work out if he’s pandering to what producers expect of him by writing “urban safari jungle s**t”. This was art about art that felt pressingly topical, and while there were rough edges to it, there was also vital vim and intent.

Helen Murray

The best theatre of 2018

4. John, National Theatre

American playwright Annie Baker’s much-hyped The Flick left me a bit underwhelmed; this swept me up completely. A synopsis – a fighting couple stay in a strange, kitschy B&B filled with uncanny china dolls – doesn’t do it justice. Here was the finest dissection of a floundering relationship and look at how gender politics infects us all. Here, too, was a kind of metaphysical mysteriousness that was truly stirring – John wasn’t quite a ghost story, but rather, it eerily tilted towards the darker depths of the human soul. It was long, it was slow, and I loved every minute.

Stephen Cummiskey

The best theatre of 2018

3. The Writer, The Almeida

Yes, another from the north London theatre – but what a year they had. And this was a play that really grappled with the specifics of its own setting: Ella Hickson’s meta-theatrical masterwork began with a scene set at a theatre, where a young female writer castigated a sleazy older male director. But Blanche McIntyre’s production perpetually snatched the rug from under your feet, and was frighteningly smart and formally thrilling as it did so, asking potent questions about gender, power, capitalism and art. As theatre-about-theatre, it could also be maddening, and had a wildly ambiguous final scene that drove everyone nuts. Quite possibly the most written-about, talked-about, argued-about play of the year.

Manuel Harlan

The best theatre of 2018

2. Ear for Eye, Royal Court

The year saw a genuine increase in the diversity of stories getting told in British theatre, and Debbie Tucker Green’s incendiary play was a pinnacle of that: brilliantly tough, absolutely necessary. A large black cast moved through elliptical scenes exposing racial prejudice and police brutality – some beautifully poetic, some just vibrating with fury. And a long final filmed section demanded that audiences face the hard truth about British and American slave laws. It was a play that stayed with me long after it finished.

Stephen Cummiskey

The best theatre of 2018

1. Summer and Smoke, The Almeida

If you’d told me in January that top of my list would be this lesser-known Tennessee Williams play, surely the least enticing show on the Almeida’s absolutely stellar programme, I might have scoffed. But Rebecca Frecknall’s direction of this tale of thwarted love was as delicate and distinctive as it was wonderfully heart-squeezing. Matthew Needham was a burningly intense leading man, but it was Patsy Ferran’s incredibly detailed, funny performance that rocketed this to number one. The best news? It transferred to the West End, where you can catch it until 19 January.

Marc Brenner

Julio Jose Seffino and Carla Dominguez have a distinctive sense of momentum: steps seem to have the unstoppable swing of a pendulum, until they snap to a halt. Sebastian Alvarez and Victoria Saudelli have an unpredictable recklessness in their acrobatic numbers, leaping into position.

Marcos Esteban Roberts and Louis Junqueira Malucelli bring an almost brittle speed to their footwork; I like them best in the shimmying steps and tiny quarter turns on the spot: her sequinned dress seems to shimmer with trembling movement. Esteban Simon and Marilu Leopardi dance with prowling grace.

The show also gives space to its musicians, the quartet of piano, violin, bandoneon and contrabass bringing attack and individuality to both traditional and more recent tango music.

Until 16 February. Box office 020 7863 8000

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies