If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by puffs from authorities proclaiming the show to be ‘very, very on top’ and ‘an exemplary display of excellence’. This primitive advertising strategy seems to have worked: on the night I went, the Hammersmith Apollo (capacity around 3,500) was filled to the gills, the crowd made up of the same social mix that you might find at the Cirque du Soleil. What did any of us think we’d be getting?

‘Shen Yun’, as the two robotically scripted compères informed us in front of the curtain, is Chinese for something along the lines of ‘the beauty of divine beings dancing’. Based in New York, it trains and operates eight troupes that tour globally, presenting a different programme every year – a model similar to the Holiday on Ice franchise ubiquitous in my youth. Behind it, unapologetically, is the ideology of the Falun Gong movement that mushroomed in China during the early 1990s. Its spread worried the communist regime, which now proscribes and persecutes its members. Falun Gong accuses the state of torture, arbitrary arrest and organ harvesting.

It has since spread to Chinese communities in Taiwan, Europe and the USA. At first glance it can look harmless enough – a spiritual practice focused on ‘truthfulness, compassion and forbearance’, syncretic of Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity, and having no truck with violence. But there may be a dash of Scientology in there too, and in exile its political alignment has veered far right towards QAnon fantasies as well as extremely narrow attitudes to sexuality.

Constituted as a not-for-profit charity, Shen Yun functions as Falun Gong’s squeaky-clean face to the world. Its goal is to reclaim what it describes as the culture of classical Chinese civilisation, drawing on the pantomime format of traditional Chinese opera, a rough-and-tumble demotic spectacle with elements of circus and martial arts, far removed from the courtly refinements of Japanese Noh.

Over its two-hour duration, Shen Yun presents about 20 vignettes, interspersed with musical interludes during which one prim lady sings a melancholy lament and another saws away on the two strings of a spike fiddle. Each scene has a Technicolored backdrop of CGI video depicting idealised landscapes, mostly of misty mountains and cascading waterfalls, out of and into which, via a clever bit of jiggery-pokery, the dancers appear to materialise.

The bulk of the episodes focus on Chinese folk-tales enacted with pantomimed emotions, but there’s also a striking excursion into modernity showing a park in a Chinese city in which innocent youths are arrested and tortured by apish official thugs for the crime of displaying Falun Gong banners. Redemption comes with the descent from the heavens of an archangel. If only it did.

What disappointed me was the low level of technical virtuosity. The dancing has been rigorously rehearsed: timing is precise, lines are dead straight, the women are supple and graceful, the men are lithe and virile. But aside from a few back flips and somersaults, there’s nothing to draw a gasp of admiration or surprise. I was more impressed by the speed of the costume changes than I was by anything that happened on stage.

By today’s standards, where everything is indiscriminately acclaimed with whistling standing ovations, the audience response was oddly muted, with the most enthusiastic applause being reserved for an orchestra that played doggedly through a succession of anodyne banalities. Slickly produced, colourfully staged and competently performed, Shen Yun is not to be lightly dismissed as the source of an evening’s light entertainment. But it’s not an experience you’d want to repeat.