Five years after its creation at the Wells, and with many thousands of touring miles under its Shaolin belt, Sutra returned this week to its birthplace in Rosebery Avenue. The staging remains visually prodigious in the echoing and re-echoing imagery that emerges from Antony Gormley’s design of 20 coffin-like boxes which serve the cast of Buddhist monks from the Shaolin monastery in China as carapace, hidey-hole, building blocks, gymnasium.

Gormley’s visual austerities – the stage a no-coloured arena; the boxes capable of brilliant transformations, from shell or dolmen or even exiguous and claustrophobic Japanese hotel room – provide a reverberant location for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s movement dramas as he views, comments on, joins in the kung-fu world of his cohort of monks. They fight, leap, spin and roll, and manoeuvre the boxes to create communities, reminders of mortality and shelters from mortality.

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