Stories, The Tap Dance Sensation

Last Updated on October 16, 2026

A Young Actor’s Tale Told Through Vigorous Dance

3.0 out of 5.0 stars

Stories, self-described as “The Tap Dance Sensation”, is a short, high-octane show of non-stop dancing, with a perfunctory, barely understandable plot, that doesn’t much matter because the dancers are so good and the production’s visual element so strong, mostly due to Alex Hardellet’s lighting design, that it keeps its momentum somehow.

Stories has just opened for a two-and-a-half week residency at the Peacock Theatre, where it had a well received first UK run a couple of years ago. It’s very much Romain Rachline Borgeaud’s baby: he created his RB Dance Company, which premiered Stories in 2019 in France, and is credited as the show’s writer, composer, director, choreographer and producer. The owner of a dance studio, Rachline Borgeaud has developed a style of tap dance for our times; so, don’t think tap dance as imprinted in our minds by the floating elegance of Fred and Ginger; rather, think energetic, grungy, urban movement, where the actual clickety-clacks play second fiddle to modern day jazz and commercial dance.

All that dancing – and you have to admire the extraordinary stamina of the ten-strong cast – is very loosely pegged to a flimsy plot: young actor Icarus (Thimêo Garin, vary gamin and very appealing) is a screen sensation, but he is under the oppressive influence of his director (Jérôme Louis, tall and menacing). Try as he might, he can’t escape until the very end, when he rips the wires of a studio spotlight, which may or may not symbolise his liberation. This follows a rollercoaster of short scenes, where Icarus fights a bunch of hoodlums, meets a pretty girl in a red dress, subsequently finds her dead, visits a hotel, goes down the subway…

All this is framed, again very loosely, by Stories’ musical score, a percussive collection of rock tracks, where a deep male voice intones poetic texts supposed to relate to the action. Thus, “Come down to earth and put your feet on the ground/So you can stop all the running and take a look around.”

Or, “The lady in the damn pretty dress is a mess/But oh man, she’s a damn pretty girl.” You get the gist.

Federica Mugnai’s sets are extremely versatile, which also means they are very busy, and this can get a little tiresome, with dancers working as stage hands, ceaselessly pushing and placing and locking bits of scenery – essentially two large staircases and a series of adaptable blocks that can stand for desks in a newspaper office, a gambling table in a nightclub/casino, or a hotel lift.

To me, the highlight of Stories was Alex Hardelett’s truly original and simply dazzling lighting design. It’s varied, it seems to use all the resources available, be it shafts of light, colour, neon bars, hazy atmospheres, brief blackouts, soft strobe lighting for a fight scene… it gets so that I became totally entranced and couldn’t wait to see what he would do next. I think it’s fair to say that to a large extent Hardelett is responsible for the show’s most successful element, its look. That, together with the dancers’ indefatigability, justifies my star rating.

Where Stories faltered was in its choreography, which I found samey and unoriginal. Its ensemble movement works for the first 10 or 15 minutes, but after a while it becomes apparent that there’s little or no variety to the basic horizontal lines of dancers facing flat out and tapping away, their feet occluded by a raised lip on the edge of the stage, the actual tapping overwhelmed by the musical score’s beat.

Still, at 65 minutes’ duration, plus a short encore where some of dancers beat the rhythm on drums that suddenly materialise from above, it knows when we’ve had enough, and I don’t think most of the audience on opening night minded the obscure story they’d been told, such was the vitality with which it was presented.

Stories is at the Peacock Theatre 14 – 31 Oct at 7.30 pm. Sat mats at 2.30 pm. Sun at 2.30 only. No performance on Mondays
Dur.: 70 mins no interval. Tickets: £33 – 75

Peacock Theatre
Portugal Street
London WC2A 2HT

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