Bence Vági makes extraordinary circus. Following the remarkable IMA at last year’s Fringe, Recirquel are back this year with a new work, Paradisum. Circus is possibly doing the work an injustice: you could equally well describe it as dance, physical theatre or visual theatre. It’s all of these and none of these.

Where much circus offers a thin narrative that strings together a series of tricks, Vági deals in extravagant philosophical ideas. The publicity for the show talks of the myth of regenesis following the silence of a perished world. The piece begins with a muscular man, barely dressed, slithering across a barely lit stage. Beautiful aerial work with a pole sees him suspended, motionless, illuminated by a single shaft of light.

More performers emerge from a cavernous mesh that looks like black chainmail and a sequence of acrobatics, more aerial work and a menacing tussle between man and a faceless demon unfolds across the stage. You could justly press all of the circus cliches into action for this production: the performers did seem boneless. Weightless. They did appear to defy gravity. All with consummate ease. One woman hangs in space – and then turns herself upside down as her hair blows in the wind.

Paradisum is set to a soundtrack worthy of Michael Nyman: all soaring strings, brooding electronica and menacing percussion. If you’re being ungenerous, the first forty minutes make you feel rather like you’ve woken up in a noisy Mordor and it’s full of barely dressed beautiful people contorting themselves in the sky. But if your threshold for conceptual art is high, you’ll be in heaven. The last but one sequence with the ladder and juggling balls seemed to stretch the concept almost to breaking point – but maybe it was Jacob’s Ladder, so maybe that was okay. The final crescendo, as paradise is revealed, is theatrical perfection.

The spectacle is so otherworldly that it’s only when the six artists take their curtain call to a standing ovation and they wave at us, their audience, that you remember they’re mortal.