LAST AND FIRST MEN
The Coronet Theatre
★★½
“visually arresting and conceptually intriguing”
First and Last Men is a contemporary dance work inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s 1930s science-fiction novel of the same name. The production draws heavily from Jóhann Jóhannsson’s film and score, originally created as a cinematic meditation on the novel. Projected behind the performers are stark black-and-white images of vast concrete monuments and drifting mist, while Tilda Swindon’s measured narration recounts the story of humanity two billion years into the future – the last men attempting to communicate across time at the edge of extinction.
The visual and sonic world is undeniably powerful. The monumental structures – Yugoslav spomeniks filmed like relics of a forgotten civilisation – dominate the stage. They are imposing, beautiful, and melancholic. The score swells with a sense of cosmic inevitability, and Swindon’s voice carries intellectual and emotional weight. In many ways, the film and narration are more compelling than the live performance unfolding in front of them.
Adrienne Hart’s Neon Dance brings the last men to life through dancers Fukiko Takase, Kelvin Kilonzo and Aoi Nakamura. In Stapledon’s vision, these future beings possess telepathic abilities and an evolved consciousness. Onstage, however, they appear less like higher forms of life and more like stylised extensions of the backdrop. The costumes by Mikio Sakabe and Ana Rajcevic are simple yet effective, at times resembling moving monuments themselves – sculptural forms that echo the concrete giants on screen. This visual parallel is striking and arguably one of the production’s strongest theatrical ideas.
Yet the choreography (by Adrienne Hart, Makiko Aoyama and the dancers) does not rise to the same level of invention. The movement is repetitive and often feels empty, circling the same gestures without deepening or expanding the narrative. Instead of embodying the epic scale of extinction and evolution, the dancers frequently seem to fill space rather than transform it. The sense of doomsday is established from the outset and remains static throughout. There is little tonal shift, no development, no contrast – only a continuous atmosphere of solemnity.
Despite the dancers’ technical precision and control, the choreography does not add new layers of meaning; it rarely matches the scale or intelligence of the source material. The most affecting moments occur when the movement stills and the audience can fully absorb the film’s haunting imagery and the gravity of the text.
There is ambition here – a bold attempt to translate speculative philosophy into physical form. What remains, however, is a production in which the cinematic elements overshadow the live performance. The monuments linger in the mind; the choreography feels like carefully composed, yet ultimately empty imagery.
First and Last Men is visually arresting and conceptually intriguing, yet it feels static and underdeveloped. For a work about the end of humanity and the vast arc of time, it paradoxically feels emotionally narrow – a beautiful but monotonous meditation that struggles to justify its choreographic presence.
LAST AND FIRST MEN
The Coronet Theatre
Reviewed on 26th February 2026
by Nasia Ntalla
Photography by Miles Hart
