IT’S a great idea. Take those iconic 1930s images of labourers building the Empire State Building – and creating with it the 20th century’s US powerhouse – and make a dance show based on them, exploring the themes of masculinity, fragility, and male bonding.

It’s a theme Eastleigh-based Zoie Golding is well-known for, having set up her all-male dance company Zoielogic in 2011 to ‘challenge perceptions of men in dance and to get guys dancing.’

‘Safe’ is on tour around the country, and with one night at the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth, it started off with a scene that is convincing and clever - five labourers judderingly ascend the heady heights in an ‘elevator’ – to their ‘office’ of half built metal structures.

Male bonding, friendship, rivalry and fisty-cuffs are all danced out in the first half of the show, and we get the idea – that this was a fragile world where life and labour was cheap, and the men probably did bond quite strongly up there in the sky.

But for me there is a lack of originality. The dancers could have been way up on a higher set - although there are some clever acrobatics using the metal ‘girders’, most of the action takes place on the ground. And the score – grinding metallic soundscapes interspersed with snippets of Ella Fitzgerald, Irish jigs and some gypsy jazz – relies too much on those ideas of 1930s America we already know well. I was hoping for something quite spectacular, but the show lacks a wow factor – and ironically plays it a bit too safe.

Rachel Adams