Reviewed today is the performance of Dance In Time at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

Ettore Scola's film Le Bal, from 1983, was a tastefully allegorical affair; Pál Békés's stage version for Budapest's Vígszínház Comedy Theatre is infused with energy and gaudy glamour. Using dance, gesture, mime, movement and music, it re-creates seven decades of Hungarian history in a shabbily elegant ballroom, moving easily from present to past, without words.

László Marton, who is also the artistic director of the Vígszínház and international associate director of the Abbey, creates memorable stage images through short scenes that are in turn comic, dramatic, erotic and poignant. The opening sequence, which establishes the characters of a group of somewhat desperate, ill-assorted couples, uses broad, cartoonish humour to grab our attention before the mood changes.

As couples unite and separate, their interactions re-create the major events and shifting political allegiances of 20th-century Hungary. Although some of the references will inevitably be lost to a non-Hungarian audience, the key moments are clear: the first and second World Wars, the occupation by Nazis, then communists, the suppression of the 1956 revolution.

As demonstrated by Complicite's Street Of Crocodiles and Theo Angelopoulos's filmed Balkan epic, Ulysses' Gaze, dance and movement can capture a sense of historical flux in ways that may be more expressive than words, and this is marvellously conveyed here.

Choreographed by Zoltán Imre, the 26 members of this versatile ensemble have impressive fluidity and ease, arising from their extended improvisation as they created this piece, drawing on family memories as well as those of their wider society.

Yet what makes this production so appealing is the fact the dance doesn't always have to carry narrative or even metaphorical weight; there are interludes, such as an exquisite tango sequence, that are pure movement - expressing various kinds of yearning.

In another, a graceful elderly couple regain their youthful vitality as they dance, removing each other's grey wigs, reversing time. A gleeful moment from the 1960s, a clandestine free-for-all to the rhythms of Rock Around The Clock, it had the Abbey audience on its feet. Audience participation never seemed so painless.

Ends tomorrow