“This is Islam­o­pho­bic shit,” cried an angry spec­ta­tor two-thirds of the way through DV8’s inves­ti­ga­tion of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in ‘Can We Talk About This?’.

‘This’ being free speech, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, Islam, Islamism, the issues at the heart of DV8’s extra­or­di­nary new show.

Lloyd New­son’s com­pany has, for more than quar­ter of a cen­tury, blurred the lines between dance and the­atre as a way of, in the company’s own words, ‘rein­vest­ing dance with mean­ing, par­tic­u­larly where this has been lost through for­malised tech­niques’. It has always tack­led con­tro­ver­sial and dif­fi­cult sub­jects, but the lat­est is likely to be the most chal­leng­ing yet.

The show opens, as most of those in the audi­ence must have known, with a cast mem­ber demand­ing of the spec­ta­tors ‘Do you feel morally supe­rior to the Tal­iban?’.  It’s a nod to Mar­tin Amis who asked that same ques­tion to a hos­tile audi­ence in a noto­ri­ous debate at London’s ICA, back in 2007. It is hardly the most sophis­ti­cated of ques­tions. Yet its very unso­phis­ti­ca­tion reveals so starkly the spec­tre haunt­ing the lib­eral moral swamp.

It is that sense of moral ret­i­cence – even of guilt – at the thought of pass­ing judg­ment upon other cul­tures, revealed by the reluc­tance to think that one could be morally supe­rior to the Tal­iban, that lies at the heart of Can We Talk about This?.  The show begins with the infa­mous Ray Hon­ey­ford row in Brad­ford in 1985, and moves through the Rushdie affair, the mur­der in 2004 of Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, the Dan­ish car­toons con­tro­versy the fol­low­ing year, and the ban­ning in 2009 of Dutch MP Geert Wilders from this coun­try because of his anti-Islamic film Fitna, all inter­wo­ven with dis­cus­sions of forced mar­riage, hon­our killings, jihadism.  The emo­tion that courses through every scene is a pul­sat­ing anger at the way that lib­eral cow­ardice has inter­wo­ven with mul­ti­cul­tural naivety to allow Islamist extrem­ist to silence crit­ics and to betray both prin­ci­ples and people.

Newson’s argu­ment that there is a con­spir­acy of silence about Islamist wrongs is under­mined by the fact that most of the cases he doc­u­ments are already famil­iar to us from the media. “To speak out,” some­one says, “is called racist.” No, it’s not: it’s called jour­nal­ism, as evi­denced by the quotes in the show from Mar­tin Amis and Christo­pher Hitchens, and the numer­ous colum­nists cited in the pro­gramme. And, much as I applaud a piece of phys­i­cal the­atre that deals with seri­ous issues, the debate about mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism is over-simplified. What is never explored is the idea that inte­gra­tion in some areas of life can be com­bined with preser­va­tion of one’s cul­tural and reli­gious iden­tity. Per­haps such crit­i­cism is unfair. After all, Can We Talk About This? is phys­i­cal the­atre not a round­table dis­cus­sion. The ambi­tion of the show, and its will­ing­ness to stomp all over the debate, is its great strength.

As always with DV8, the phys­i­cal side of the show is impres­sive: one female per­former illus­trates the deter­mi­na­tion to escape a forced mar­riage purely through sin­u­ous hand and hip movements.

Can We Talk About This? is, like all DV8 works, both thought pro­vok­ing and gut-wrenching, food for mind and heart. It is the kind of bold, polem­i­cal spec­ta­cle that the the­atre so badly needs, a world away from the insipid offer­ings that all too often lit­ter the con­tem­po­rary stage.