Pestilence, lunacy, sexual excess, hysteria… it’s all here, served up with grotesque glee and playfulness. The Red Room is an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – a popular text amongst visual theatre makers (Punchdrunk and Paper Cinema being two other recent Red Death interpreters). This one’s a dance-theatre piece directed by a physical theatre performer/director (Al Seed); a beautiful burlesque romp with – as you’d expect from Seed – strong elements of dark clown or Bouffon. Carefully crafted, expertly performed, The Red Room (after Poe) explores typical Gothic concerns: the battle between reason and emotion; the struggle of the individual versus the needs of the collective; the lure of the dangerous ‘outsider’; the fear of the invasion of the body.

It’s certainly a ‘total’ visual theatre experience: there are stunning lighting shifts (electric emerald, lurid lime, vivid violet,) as we skip merrily through the colour-coded rooms in the doomed castle of the story, towards our final razor red destination; gorgeous white-on-white costume/mask design, with some interesting peripheral puppetry (cloth horses emerging from swathes of skirts); and entertaining performances from a team of dancers collected up from many disciplines (ballet, hip hop, contemporary, capoeira) who meet the physical theatre sensibility of Al Seed’s direction full-on – for example, when a courtly gavotte breaks into a chaotic clown fight.

As an added bonus, for the run at the Traverse Al Seed was performing in the show – and although this was a last-minute deputising for a dancer on compassionate leave, it is actually hard to imagine how the piece might be without his distinctive physical presence.