Peut-être plays as a duet between João Paulo dos Santos (a Chinese-pole specialist) and Guillaume Dutrieux (a jazz musician, who, for this performance at least, traverses the stage on roller-skates). The nature of their on-stage relationship is never exactly clear — broadly Guillaume was the aggressor, forcing João up the pole in spite of his fatigue/anxiety, although there were suggestions also of shared dependency. There was a lot of eye contact between the two, but it was hard to know what was being communicated. I think what kept this show from being quite as great as it could have been was the joy that João finds in his performance, and the pleasure that he takes from his friendship with Guillaume, was never allowed to take charge of the show.

Nevertheless, the show was extremely successful in evoking a queer world of distortion and doubling, into which projection and live music slotted perfectly. There wasn’t a great deal of technology on display, but its use was always planned within a structure that moved between (visual and sonic) complexity and simplicity and created brilliant instances of focused attention: in particular a silent performance from João which came gradually to be tracked by the amplified sounds of his own movement.

The sweetest and most theatrically affecting moment, though, came near the end when Guillaume gave João a saxophone and the two of them together played the tune that had had its melodic shape sketched throughout the show. João wasn’t great at saxophone, but it didn’t at all matter.