"A thought cannot be caught," says one character in Wim Vandekeybus' Menske, and Vandekeybus' audience must know what he means. Thoughts, ideas, images and words comes streaming from the stage, in fragments and glimpses, as if the director has cast his net through the scene and swept up individual moments and details while the rest slips away through the holes.

From this fragmented vision we can piece together an almost post-apocalyptic world, where some kind of shift or trauma has taken place. People may look normal enough, but their behaviour tells otherwise: the woman constantly getting dressed and undressed; the jaded man listing society's faults in dispatches to the mysterious Pablo; the bedraggled businessman shoving his hand down a girl's knickers, and her letting him.

The company's starting point for this piece was the idea of seismic change – do we have the capacity to adapt? And Menske gives us a clear answer: no. Even those who take control end up broken, as played out by actor/dancer Kylie Walters, a lone dominatrix in her yellow stilettos and one of the strongest actors in the ensemble.

There is an idea of duality in the action and the movement. Duets are confrontational yet the partners are totally dependent on each other; a man plays out two sides of the same conversation. It seems it's impossible for people to divorce their new selves from the old. There's also a constant circularity, from the telephone wires pulled in circles round their pole, to the corkscrewing flight of the dancers hurling themselves in the air, to the toy aeroplane that loops-the-loop and comes back every time – there's no escape from where you began.

Menske's vision leads to madness as the scene takes a surreal sidestep worthy of David Lynch, arriving in the strip-lit corridors of a run-down hospital. An eerie drone hangs in the air with quiet menace, the mundane becomes maddening and our players finally lose their grip. It's a dim, dystopic reflection, where people exist side-by-side but never really engage with one another, their mysteries remain unsolved and redemption is far away.

Vendekeybus is a master of surface drama, punctuating his scenes with bursts of full-throttle movement, driven by the music's shuddering riffs, strobing lights, copious dry ice and audacious use of sets and props. But the human drama doesn't throw a kick to the stomach in quite the same way. The huge, rich set pieces come from nowhere and burn themselves on our imaginations like pictures on a Polaroid, but without the depth of motive, reason or human connection behind them, the danger is they'll fade just as quickly.