‘The German production has had a standing ovation every night for 36 years. Graf went before big tennis competitions to gee herself up. And the German football team would go before an international’

Andrew Lloyd Webber said to me: “I have this story.” It was going to be an animated film based on Thomas the Tank Engine, but animation back in the early 1980s was really expensive, so that never happened. Then we started working on something called Rocky Mountain Railroad. That was going to be a train race across America to see who would have the honour of taking Prince Charles and Diana on a royal tour. There’s history for you. Andrew had a train set in his attic. I’d had one as a boy. It didn’t seem to be a daft idea. The previous show we’d done was people pretending to be cats, so people pretending to be trains wasn’t such a leap.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Themes such as exoticised bodies and reversing the male gaze struggle are raised but not fully explored in Nadia Beugré’s show

The promo material for L’Homme Rare promised “insistent use of buttocks” and wasn’t wrong. Five naked male bodies spend the performance facing away from the audience, showing us only their back(side)s. No muscle is left untwerked; there’s a symphony of bottom slaps; and a quartet in formation like Swan Lake’s cygnets, with arms round each other’s waists, a bum cheek cupped in each hand.

As so often happens with nudity on stage, the novelty wears off and we’re left with bodies, different shapes, different skin colours. Note the hip bones, shoulder blades, dimples, the indentation down the length of the spine. Covered in a sheen of sweat, their forms are abstractly beautiful – except a body is never really abstract. Deliberately objectified, perhaps – that’s one of the themes in this work by Nadia Beugré, a choreographer from Ivory Coast, now based in France, showing as part of this year’s London international festival of theatre.