Akram Khan doesn’t mention Waiting for Godot in his programme note for Bahok, but anyone who’s seen Beckett’s lament will rcognise it in Khan’s new work. There are the travellers unable to move, endlessly waiting for news that never arrives. What looks like a messenger eventually appears (Pozzo in Godot, an airport departure board in Bahok) but it says no more than they already know.

Like Godot, Bahok has humour (bits of it are very funny) and like Godot it has an unsettling, inconclusive ending. Lost, bored, and emotionally vulnerable to fellow travellers: these are the themes of Bahok, and Khan uses unexpected means to bring them alive.

The first surprise is that Khan himself does not appear. The British-Bangladeshi soloist turned dance maker is a charismatic performer, and his last two hits (Zero Degrees with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Sacred Monsters with Sylvie Guillem) rested very much on his seductive stage presence.

In his place come eight very able dancers, including three from the National Ballet of China, who are credited with creating the movement style. This is the second and third surprise, as Khan usually choreographs and almost always draws on his Kathak heritage. Instead we see what’s generally called “character work”, that is the invented movement quirks of the individual dancers.

Kim Young Jin has what is best described as an inside-out, back-to-front quality, while Eulalia Ayguade Farro moves with the disjunctures of a monkey. The ballet dancers have grace and line and Saju’s combative vigour reveals his martial art training in Kalaripayattu.

All eight move, speak and interact, and together convey the inertia, boredom and desperation of not being able to get home. Khan also aims at the idea that if you’re always travelling, or have no physical home like refugees then your memories and DNA become a surrogate one.

This theme is less successfully conveyed. Part of the reason is that some sections, such as the passport sequence and the male duet that turns into a fight, are just too long, and you lose interest in the point before it is made. Khan also doesn’t quite catch our longing to go home (this isn’t the same as being bored with waiting), nor the pull of home even if ours is an unhappy one.

What we do get is an intense sense of life’s emotional baggage. But then, Bahok means carrier in Bengali.

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