These days you have to go a long way to see a dance show as programmatic as Caravaggio: Exile and Death. It portrays imaginary scenes from the life of a great artist who was also, on the side, an anarchic bad boy in and out of trouble all his life. This was a lock up your daughters – and sometimes your sons – sort of fellow.

Choreographer Dharshan Singh Bhuller has combined the work of seven dancers, three men, four women, some effective back projection and outstanding music – it's exciting, strident and unapologetic stuff from a whole range of composers – to come up with something remarkable and original.

The show is sometimes seductively beautiful; the choreography varied and often brilliantly executed. The best scene has Harriet Bone being helped into an elaborately ornate dress to a background of some stark and austere violin music.

Costumes are stylised period – Caravaggio was a contemporary of Shakespeare. And it's the colours of the costumes together with the lighting that cause many scenes to suggest, in passing, his paintings as a whole. Some scenes though are definitely tableaux of particular pictures.

Lee Clayden, dancing the artist himself, bears a striking resemblance to the real-life Caravaggio. In the scenes of suffering he also looks like our conventional image of Jesus Christ. There's a strong religious strand running through the whole piece. One of the most striking scenes is done to the sound of the Gloria sung in Latin.

This dance company clearly means business. It will be back.

Alan Geary