Duo’s ‘Sinner’ doesn’t quite nail it

You’d expect “Sinner,” the first work by the curiously named company Stan Won’t Dance, to be more of a knockout. After all, the guys who created the two-member dance-theater troupe -- Liam Steel and Rob Tannion -- used to be part of London’s high-energy, provocative DV8 Physical Theatre.

The work, given the first of two local performances Thursday at the Skirball Cultural Center, takes off from a compelling subject: the actions of the deranged David Copeland, who in 1999 set off three nail bombs in Afro-Caribbean, Asian and gay communities in Britain, in the last case killing three people and injuring 80 others.

The plot outlined in Ben Payne’s succinct text is simple: The conflicted, repressed Robert -- Steel in the Copeland role -- comes into a gay pub. To his horror, he finds himself attracted to Martin (Ben Wright), apparently his alter ego. The two begin a cat-and-mouse dance of attraction and repulsion, dominance and submission. Robert eventually turns on Martin and, in the work’s most powerful section, nails him to a table as an emblem of the horror to come.

But the piece, which requires equal mastery of text and movement, didn’t quite jell at the Skirball.

For starters, Wright, seen locally in 1997 as one of the alternating princes in Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake,” was a gentler, more considerate Martin than Tannion, who can be seen in a live London performance on a 2Luck Concepts DVD. Wright has taken over the role for the company’s U.S. tour.

This isn’t to say that he lacked the necessary dance power. But the psychological dynamics were different, and the lack of tension between the two men, plus the halting dead spots in their delivery of the text, led to a low-voltage performance.

Steel had less to play off, so his reversal of roles at the end seemed less motivated. And Wright’s revelation of Martin’s bigotry, the plot’s pivot point, lacked sufficient credibility.

Maybe things will pick up as the tour continues.

A minor point: Maybe they’ll also get the onstage cellphones to ring audibly, providing justification for the sudden shifts in the action.

Yet there are greater problems built into Payne’s concept, as devised by him, Steel, Tannion and company executive director Ellie Beedham. Although we’re looking at two people, Robert and Martin are intended to be two aspects of the same person. After all, the piece is subtitled “A self-destructive solo for two men.” We are supposed to be watching some kind of interior struggle.

To cue all this, at the start, the two tumble over each other as they talk, blurring their individuality. Later, in the middle, they exchange names as they reintroduce themselves. Robert takes over lines earlier spoken by Martin and ends the piece by walking into the pub in Martin’s self-confident manner.

So the ending presupposes that we reinterpret everything as occurring in the moment before the events actually happened. Yet it also looks as if the cycle of bombings is endless. The suggestion is that everyone is bigoted and could just as likely turn into a nail-bombing Copeland, which is pretty farfetched. Or that Copeland would have continued his actions if he hadn’t been caught, convicted and sentenced to six life terms.

In short, for all the textual and movement symmetries, the focus of the piece goes out of whack. And there really isn’t enough emotional payoff to justify the effort of reevaluating everything that’s transpired.