Butoh is an expressionist contemporary dance form which originated in Japan in the late 1950s. Traditionally, its performers have white-painted faces and shaved heads, though at the Pegasus there was long, whitened hair. The choreography is slow-moving, stylised and mysterious.

Café Reason, which has existed for ten years now, has taken on this style and adapted it to suit western audiences. This latest offering is the story of Orpheus and Euridice. Although Butoh is basically a Japanese art, it seems to me just as valid for them to present a Greek myth, as it is for a western composer to give us the story of Madam Butterfly and, in many ways, they have made a good job of it.

The performance is underlaid with live music, played on stage by the improvising rock band Nonstop Tango, a title of some irony, since the atmospheric, synthesiser-enhanced sounds are firmly non-melodic.

Malcolm Atkins is the moving force behind this concept both in the libretto and the music, while Jeannie Donald-McKim, together with the members of the company, has made the dance. Atkins, the band's singer and keyboard player, is also Orpheus in later life. He steps forward between the dancing, a world-weary 1960s rocker, to tell us the familiar tale of Euridice's death from a snakebite, Orpheus' descent into Hades to fetch her back, and his fatal mistake of turning to look at her, which results in her return to the dead. Paul Mackilligin is the dancer-Orpheus, and Ana Barbour gives a fine performance as Euridice in a floor-length cream-coloured dress. There are some highly theatrical moments: her slow sinking into death, during which she almost disappears, the striking entrance of Death (Jeannie Donald-McKim) robed in red and masked, and the brilliantly imagined inhabitants of Hades - bubble-wrapped dancers who crawl and twitch like demented caterpillars. There is an entertaining dance at the start for six women in 1950s ball-gowns and cocktail dresses, and later we have them dressed, like Euridice, in cream period dresses, creating a mysterious other-worldly atmosphere, which reigns throughout. This is an interesting piece, bravely done, flawed only by the varying abilities of its performers.