Tap Olé, Peacock Theatre

Catalan dance is one of Sadler’s Wells’ themes this spring, though I’d love to know how much of what Tap Olé does can really be called Catalan - this is a tap fusion company that owes its germination to Riverdance, Tap Dogs and the efforts in New York recently to revive rhythm tap. Attaching tap class skills to Spanish guitar makes what’s on at the Peacock this week more a tap show in a tourist-trail tapas bar than a theatrical dance production worth a detour.

This appears to be the object. Tap Olé launched eight years ago by two efficient tap dancers who’d done the Riverdance/Tap Dogs/Stomp medley tour Fire of Dance and some Broadway hoofing, and went home to Barcelona to tap into some of this trend, start up local classes, and formulate a show along with a jazz guitarist. Tapeando is their second production, this time with four dancers and four musicians. The name is frequently found on tapas restaurants, so "little bites" might do it for translation. It attempts to find congruence between two rhythmic foodstuffs that I’d say are at war from the very first, no reconciliation possible in one digestion system - and I suspect their musicians could probably tell them that because the band are much the better part of this unsatisfying evening and take some unwarranted punishment.

While the dancers have certainly skills in their big black-shod feet, what they try to do with them is a strange half-breed of Spanish and hoofing without the best genes of either. If they want to explore idiosyncratic rhythmic personalities, express individual whims and caprices, in the way the memorable US black hoofers did (and let’s not forget that the elegant Buster Brown, see bottom video, was a massive inspiration to the rhythm tap revival that these Tap Olé dancers are pupils of), then they shouldn't be applying so much four-square show-tap rhythm in their dancing which strangles much of the choice of Spanish music that they can work with.

Second, one can't look here for exploration of the delicacies of rhythm, as foot music, when much of the music they’re trampling so busily on is really not intended to be plastered with heavily clacking percussive effects. In flamenco, music and dance rhythm are twins born together, there is not a transplant of one to another. Tap Olé have a good, rumpled percussionist, Carlos Cortés, who is emasculated by the need for the dancers to clack all over everything louder than him. He has one solo cajón number of his own to show his true instincts, which are delightfully syncopated and gradated in a dynamic flamenco range not available to these dancers’ utilitarian heels.

There's also the little matter of generating the gravitas and surprise of theatre - a different thing to simply reproducing studio skills like eager teachers. It needs more entrancing atmosphere than a bundle of down-lights, and considerably more likeable costumes than the women’s black halterneck jumpsuits and men’s shirts and trousers, neither glamorous on the one hand nor streetwise and cool on the other. They should also reconsider the cheesy audience participation stuff (you are ordered to clap obediently and shout, “Hey! Olé!”) which takes us straight back to that tapas bar.

Watch Tap Olé's trailer for Tapeando

Again, if they are going to make the most of their one impressive ensemble number, in which they ripple all together across the stage in waves, drumming sound effects from the floor like rainsticks over the traditional tremolo "Spanish Romance", they shouldn’t be miked up so heavily that the effect is neutered into one mono maracas effect from each speaker left and right.

Finally, tap is a dance - but only half a dance. In the best hoofers I’ve ever seen it’s more of a personal language that the legs are speaking, while the upper half appears to be being taken for a ride by the legs, honestly and maybe comically keeping the balance going, but always with subtlety. All four of Tap Olé's dancers swing their arms in that deliberate, artificial way that news reporters who’ve been to gesture school do - it doesn’t look like choreographic shaping of space, it looks like they’re constantly telegraphing what their feet are up to, when the greatest tap dancers are terrific deceivers, who can fool you by producing unbelievably complex sounds from their feet while apparently hardly moving a muscle. It takes mystery, cool, intensity, musical genius and sometimes outrageous cheek to be a great tap dancer - anything less won't do.

• Tap Olé is at the Peacock Theatre, London, till Saturday

Watch old master Buster Brown at the age of 70 giving a short lesson in ways people walk down the street