The Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker has brought her 16-strong company back to the UK. Last Friday they were at the Wycombe Swan with her new show Cruel. When I talked to her a couple of weeks ago she told me that the title describes the human relationships she portrays, and the cruelty contained within the yearnings of human desire.

Colker likes to make use of massive props on the stage, and they tend to form the engine that drives her dancers. In Rota there is a giant ferris wheel that fills the whole stage, in Knot 125 heavy ropes dangle from the flies, and later a huge perspex box forms a stage within a stage.

A bit of a surprise, then, when the curtain goes up on dancers on an empty stage, against a simple red backcloth. They are costumed – rather disconcertingly – in spangly cocktail-blouses and black knickers, finished off with high heels. Well, that’s the girls.

The boys are fairly nondescript. They start with something near to ballroom dancing which is not appealing, but then the whole mood of the work changes as a huge table on roller-casters appears, to form a smaller stage in its own right.

Immediately dancers spring to life, leaping on to it, over it, under it, while it is manipulated by other dancers, and moved at speed, barely missing running one or two performers down.

The dancing here is athletic, with sequences where the dancers move in unison across the table, or fling themselves, or each other, into the air.

In the second part, four large revolving mirrors are the main feature. Dancers are duplicated by reflection, or cut in half as they slither through the round hole in the middle of each mirror, or hang there, suspended and stiff.

This is all entertaining enough, but where are the promised relationships?

“I try to bring the human soul on stage,” Colker told me. “With Cruel I am holding up a mirror to ourselves. When we see ourselves in the mirror, it’s how we really are, there’s no escape. There’s nothing more cruel than that! The dancers work through semi-autobiographical tales of single parents, love triangles and the bizarre ritualised sex-life of a childless couple.”

I can’t have been the only person in the theatre who failed to identify these episodes; but this is actually an enjoyable show, though one that doesn’t clearly deliver its promises.

Cruel is at the Birmingham Hippodrome on May 14 and 15, and at The Barbican, London, from June 29 to July 3.