Dance & Physical Theatre review: The Desk, Summerhall, Edinburgh

In a world increasingly dominated by a new generation of authoritarian leaders, no subject matters more than the story of how such leaders arise, how their followers become so slavishly bound to them and their ideology, and what happens when that belief begins to fail. In her brilliant 60-minute physical theatre piece The Desk, Finnish director and choreographer Reetta Honkakoski uses no words to tell the story; instead, there are just five girls, five old-fashioned school desks, and a leader, expressing through the most brilliantly sustained sequence of movement all the outlines and undercurrents of a group drawn together by such a shared belief in a common leader, and striving to outdo one another in obedience, until everything begins to fall apart.