Akram Khan’s Giselle, ENB: So beautiful and blood-curdling, you forgive the lousy storytelling

“Remind me of the plot?” This question – the first thing my companion said to me come the interval – distilled what has always exasperated me about Akram Khan’s Giselle. Where the original ballet, a Romantic-Gothic fable first staged in 1841, plays out in the Rhineland in the Middle Ages, Khan reimagines this tale of a duplicitous count (Albrecht) in love with the titular peasant girl as being a romance between one of the rich “Landlords” and a member of a disfranchised community of migrant workers from a now-defunct branch of the garment industry.

So far, so bold and brilliant. But, where the original is a masterpiece of crystalline storytelling, Khan’s and dramaturg Ruth Little’s often feels almost wilfully opaque, not making it clear enough who some of the crucial characters (Hilarion, Bathilde) are or what exactly is going on (the exact cause of Giselle’s death, for example, remains a mystery). What’s more, this 2016 show – here in its first UK revival for five years – seems to have ushered the prodigiously talented Khan down a blind alley of creating visually and narratively murky new shows with none of this one’s visual pizzazz, dramatic oomph or sheer excitement.

But that’s the thing: this Giselle does have those three attributes in spades, and English National Ballet (the company he made it for) deliver it more punchily and chillingly each time it returns. True, composer Vincenzo Lamagna might have been more melodically adventurous. But the rumbling, thunderous soundscapes he generates – with adroitly deployed snippets of Adolph Adam’s 1841 score – cleverly underpin a production whose atmosphere closes around you like fog, a bone-chilling eeriness seldom encountered outside Japanese cinema’s finest ghost stories.

The score also dovetails ideally with the rest of the production. The set, by Tim Yip – who won an Oscar for the 2000 film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon –  is as simple as it is monumental, a vast but bracingly mobile wall (very much in the spirit of Peter Pabst’s sets for Pina Bausch) that separates the haves from the have-nots. His costumes are similarly flawless, with the workers in cannily flattering rags and the Landlords looking like something from a Vivienne Westwood catwalk.

All the while, Khan lets his Kathak-contemporary instincts roar, while subtly honouring the contrast between Acts I and II of a traditional Giselle. The first is conspicuously grounded, with everyone in flat shoes, palms almost beseechingly open, and legs and feet pushing hard against the stage – which is not to say that the choreographer doesn’t find time for a love duet of rapturous intensity between Giselle and Albrecht.

But it is in Act II, when Albrecht and the spivvy “fixer” Hilarion encounter the spectres of maltreated, long-dead factory workers, that the show really takes off. As it opens, Mark Henderson’s astonishing lighting ushers both us and Giselle into a new, beautiful, menacing realm, a passage from the living world that the marvellously elemental Erina Takahashi, on Wednesday’s opening night, handled with a particularly poignant fusion of hesitancy and grace. As for the corps’s army of bo-staff-clutching phantasms – led by Emma Hawes’s cyanide-tipped dagger of a Wili Queen – Khan has them all balletically and ethereally en pointe, but their upper bodies so implacably angular and staccato they might be made of steel. Cleverly done.

On the night, the corps rose expertly to the challenge, while James Streeter’s athletic, affecting Albrecht and Ken Saruhashi’s preternaturally agile, articulate Hilarion – more special-effect than dancer – were the other crucial components in a cast that interconnected with real chemistry and felt unimprovable. Oh, I wish Khan and Little could get their story straight. But it will suck you helplessly in for all that.

Until Sept 28. Tickets: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com