Dance: Strictly, sensuously, obsessively flamenco

It's rare that dialogue from a foreign-language film sticks in the mind. But at the Peacock last week I was reminded of a gem from the 1983 cult movie Carmen - the scene where the stern flamenco mistress is taking a class of young women through the serpentine arm movements of the style. "The hips should be detached from your waist," she instructs. "Your breasts like bulls' horns, but warm and soft."

Those breasts are hard to ignore in the stage version of Carmen. Ranks of girls in shrink-wrap leotards and flounced skirts repeatedly surge forward in a climactic extension of dance-class drill. The snaking hands give way to a crescendo of clapping and stamping whose ferocity intensifies into rhythmic madness, drumming home that the tragic tale to be told has an obsessive momentum of its own.

The brilliance of this dance adaptation, conceived for the stage by dancer Antonio Gades and film-maker Carlos Saura, comes from its ruthless economy of material. Not only is Merimee's story reduced to the minimum of characters and events, but the vocabulary of flamenco is distilled to its most telling essentials. A series of spare gestural solos introduce the major players: the heel-clicking soldier Jose, the strutting bullfighter, the dangerous husband, and Carmen herself, an outrageous young hussy whose skirt-hitching stance is not just an invitation to sex but a command.

With her wide torso and muscular arms, Stella Arauzo is no beauty, but her passionate portrayal of the gypsy heroine is the incendiary device of the piece. Tough, hard-faced, almost trashy in the brazen expression of her desires, she seems to draw men to her by sheer strength of will. Her rousing set-piece dances are superb, but such is the thoroughness of Gades's direction that even at ease, sitting astride a chair at the edge of the stage, she distractedly twitches the hem of her scarlet dress between her thighs like a toreador teasing a bull.

A few cast-changes have been made since the show's visit to London last year. If anything, the company looks even more handsome. Jairo Rodriguez makes a dashing new torero, whose triumphal allure prompts the final jealous showdown between Carmen and Jose. It was inspired to show him in silence before the bullfight, posing in his finery in front of a mirror, the same that moments later will reflect the murder of Carmen. Violent tensions are masterfully controlled throughout: the stylised stick-fight between the husband and Jose, the nose-to-nose cat-fight between Carmen and a stunning (unnamed) female chorus-member, lashing their skirt-frills like angry tails.

It seems almost churlish to lament the loss of Antonio Gades in the role of Don Jose. Even at 60 he was a hard act to follow, and his replacement, Jose Manuel Huertas, lacks his fine line and his magnetism. Advanced years are no bar to seductiveness in flamenco, as the parodic contribution from the company's wrinkled and pot-bellied musicians makes plain. Youth and age, sex and death, melodious Bizet and wailing flamenco song: in a short 90 minutes, this Carmen runs the gamut of them all.

Peacock, WC2 (0171 314 8800) to 8 June.