Cirque de Glace gets around this by adding the speed of championship ice-skating into the mix, creating a unique hybrid show which will appeal as much to Dancing on Ice fans as those who enjoy circus.

Of course the skating here is much faster, more skilled and dangerous than anything you’ll see in the TV show. Male skaters balance their female partners on a single hand while spinning them with such dizzying speed that their forms become a blur, while other skaters are thrown through the air, missing the ice by inches causing audible gasps in the audience.

The stage of the Lowry’s Lyric Theatre has been turned into an eight-centimetre deep, solid ice-rink for the complex show, which is themed around a celebration of the earth from its big bang creation to present day and beyond.

CIRQUE DE GLACE translates as Ice Circus, but Evolution aimed a lot higher than Barnum and Bailey – nothing less than the History of the World narrated in rhyming couplets and illustrated by interpretative ice dancing, gymnastics, aerial work, clowning and hula hoops. It was about as far from minimalism as it is possible to travel while remaining in the same universe.

It started with a bang, or rather the Bang – the Big Bang, the birth of the aforesaid universe, aided by some nifty work in the lighting department.
In a trice, skaters were whirling around the relatively confined space of the Empire’s stage with breathtaking skill, recreating pyroclastic lava flows in a blur of glittering red spangled lycra.

The director wisely ignored less picturesque geological eras and fast forwarded to graceful butterflies fluttering through the lush Carboniferous forests while other less easily identifiable creatures swung from trapezes. Then the rise of humans (with a possible nod to Kubrick’s 2001) and suddenly the dancers produced shiny copper hula hoops. Hula hoops…?

Aha! the dawn of agriculture and the rise of the wheel. Water wheels, millwheels, all kinds of wheels rolled and spun until swiftly replaced by the appearance of monkish communities in the middle age. The monks duly set fire to a rose, perhaps in homage to Umberto Eco. A strong smell of burnt hydrocarbons from the fire effects lingered as the house lights went up
and the ice creams went on sale.

The second half featured a beguiling recreation of the first Moon Landing – ice dancing is ideally suited to simulating the movements of near-weightlessness, though one might doubt whether Armstrong and Aldrin ever danced quite so gracefully across the Sea of Tranquillity.

Next, the best sequence of the programme in purely dance terms; a snappy, snazzy mixture of ‘Wall Street’ and Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’, as slick besuited businessmen, newspapers and mobiles to hand, straphanging on the subway on their way, revealed themselves to be slaves to the almighty dollar. Bob Fosse would have approved.

In the next sequence, Evolution ceased to be a historical cavalcade, however spectacular, and revealed the ecological message at its heart. Dancers in anti-contamination suits accompanied by images of waste and pollution gave way to idyllic forests destroyed by chainsaws in a blur of strobe lighting, melting icebergs and apocalyptic lightning storms ripping the world apart.

All this was conjured, remember, by imaginative choreography delivered with surprising passion and undeniable finesse. You might expect to find it a little difficult to applaud the End of Days even when rendered in gymnastics and fireworks, but the audience had no hesitation in stamping and cheering for several curtain calls. Jennie Macfie, www.hi-arts.co.uk