Intercut with this in a suspenseful fashion, interviews with hoi polloi (I particularly liked the self-proclaimed “miscellaneous dinner ladies”) and a lot of shots of train tracks, and what you’ve got is a star – though I confess I expected him to look a bit more like Timothy Hutton.
His new deal would restore democratic principles to the free market and perhaps curb the powers of the yellow-jacketed brokers who crowd like locusts into the City to gamble on futures, our futures, and create an artificial instability. The woman with the empty glass perks up and explores its recreational possibilities – attaching it by suction to her leg, her lips, and wickedly, to a bare breast, Monnier encourages us to laugh at and with the extravagances of madness, rather than stand back and pity.But in the end what can dance tell us about mental instability that we don’t already know? Monnier had to enter the white swing doors to do her fieldwork. Over here she’d find it on the streets.The `Turning World’ season continues at The Place (0171 387 0031) and the South Bank (0171 960 4242) to 3 July.. We’ve had the book, we’ve seen the articles, now here’s the television series. Yes, it’s that unlikely hero, journalist Will Hutton, and he’s in a state: “I mean, God damn, let’s get serious about what’s happening in our country.” Note that “our” – he’s surreptitiously stolen the country back from the Tories It’s ours again now. The idea that treating workers decently makes them more loyal and productive is nothing new, but what’s in Hutton’s favour is that he’s willing to “bang on about it”, vehemently, at the drop of a hat (you don’t want to share a seat with this guy on a long train journey). A girl appears in one corner and distractedly empties a bag of blue powder-paint over her toes, then holds a difficult arabesque while inching backwards on one foot, smearing paint in a great arc across the floor.Ingenuity saves the work from cliche, just as humour prevents it being mawkish.

In a crazy tango provoked by a karaoke version of “Delilah”, dancers drag their partners backwards at 45 degrees by the scruff of the neck. A quarrelsome couple perform a fast slapping routine in which each blow stops just short of the other’s skin, producing a fiendishly complex dodge-and-duck duet. The ranter stomps about, moving chairs and plonking himself only inches from one of four television screens which flicker constantly on each side of the room and (in the way of such distractions) are otherwise ignored. If you trouble to watch there is a bearded man doing odd things with his lips Sometimes he too appears to be watching the inmates. Which one of them is disturbed?Then the company shows us why it calls itself a dance company.

The boule man suddenly breaks out of his trance into an impressively fluid solo, still partnering the ball. Each provokes instant recognition.There’s a thin, dithery, dull-eyed woman who shuffles in straight lines, glass in hand, forever in search of a drink A lanky man hobbles on, obsessed with his feet. Another is fixated on a steel petanque ball, its repeated rolling along the same strip of floor giving a soothingly regular pulse to what is otherwise a violently erratic sequence of events. Inside with the audience, the chief characters in this strange drama announce themselves through their idiosyncrasies. In those deathly lulls endemic to all clinical institutions, people in white coats glide swiftly, silently and purposefully around the perimeter, glimpsed fleetingly in doorways, sometimes communicating confidentially with each other, but always distant, apart.

Whether they sat at the edge of a room and gawped, or whether they “worked” with the inmates, we are not told. But their observations form the basis of l’atelier en pieces, “the studio in fragments”, which as a title is wilfully nondescript, given what we see.
Clever lighting over and through the translucent papery walls draws attention alternately to activity in the room and outside it. Compagnie Mathilde Monnier, brought to London by the “Turning World” season of new dance from abroad, have spent a good deal of their time in asylums near Montpellier, not dancing but watching. Even before the show gets under way it’s obvious that this is some kind of special hospital – to be blunt, a nuthouse And there’s no sneaking out the back You are part of the performance It’s your sanity that’s under attack. And this one rants in French, something about “caca” and “la guerre” in that unnervingly loud monotone that needs no translation It says: avoid the eyes But this is tricky in the circumstances.

The theatre – usually a big black box of a studio with raked seating – has been transformed. It’s now small and white, with chairs on four sides as if what was expected was not an audience so much as a handful of clinical observers. The light’s over-bright, the white lino floor squeaks, and under an oppressively low white ceiling the air is stifling, fuggy. You’ve managed to dodge the ranter on the Tube by changing carriage at London Bridge, when – would you believe it – there’s another waiting for you at The Place. I heard a whole programme of these pieces in a concert at Sverud’s old home, another wooden house in the Bergen hinterland; and although they half-irritated me at the time, I haven’t been able to forget them – especially a piece called Ballad of Revolt which works on the same principle of accumulative power through repetition as Ravel’s Bolero Sverud has populist potential Maybe next year it will come to something..