B-boys bungling Benny Hill

Yegam Theatre: Break Out
Peacock Theatre, London WC2

It is impossible not to warm to the Yegam company of South Korea, whom the UK first encountered at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival, and whose show, Jump, has become a runaway international success. A word-of-mouth hit from the outset, the show combines eye-popping martial-arts virtuosity with broad end-of-the-pier slapstick. Running gags are provided by inept burglars, a drunken uncle, a crazy mum, a geeky son-in-law who becomes a super-sexy ninja whenever his specs are removed, and other members of the nutty, nine-strong Yegam 'family'. The set is cheap and plasticky, as is the music, and as for the comedy, let's just say that the mood is set early in the piece when Grandfather jams his walking-stick up Father's rectum, and withdraws it with a pop like a champagne cork. Butoh this isn't.

In the best variety tradition, however, the clowning and buffoonery disguise extraordinary virtuosity. All the cast are Tae Kwon Do and gymnastics champs, and their kicks and flips and aerial manoeuvres are both stunning in themselves and cleverly co-ordinated into the overall arrangement.

In Yegam's latest offering, Break Out, however, the ingredients have been shuffled to woeful effect. Wrongly calculating that it was the comedy elements that made Jump such a hit, rather than its performers' skills and natural warmth, the company has created a show consisting almost entirely of slapstick. There's a thread of a plot, but mostly there's just chaos - long and tiresome sequences featuring screaming, face-pulling, pointless chases, coshings with rubber truncheons, and that last, desperate fallback of the would-be humorist: comedy nuns. It would take the genius of a Chaplin or Keaton to bring this kind of material to life, and these guys, likeable as they are, are no geniuses.

The piece also looks weirdly overproduced, with a constant turnover of near-irrelevant props, not all of which were functioning on the opening night. This was an upbeat and boisterous occasion (at least in the bar beforehand), with a large part of the audience there for the break-dancing which the promo video led you to believe is an integral part of the show. It isn't. There are just two break-dance sequences, right at the end, and neither lasts more than a couple of minutes. These sequences are great, it has to be said, with wonderfully inventive shoulder-spins, straight-arm balances and barrel rolls, and an electrifying few seconds of locking and popping, but they don't begin to constitute the 'hip-hop comedy spectacular' we've been promised.

How could Yegam have got it so wrong? Having assembled some of the hottest B-boy and girl talents in Asia, they've asked them to deliver 90 minutes of charmless sub-Benny Hill-style sight gags. It just doesn't work, and if Break Out goes on failing to deliver what it promises, the goodwill amassed by Jump is going to evaporate fast. There's a huge potential audience for high-class hip-hop dance in Britain, and it deserves more and better than this.

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