Secret meetings take place, unofficial contacts are made, the phones hum. There are minor betrayals, major idiocies, and innumerable instances of bad faith.Escobar eventually agrees to surrender himself and the hostages, provided that he is not extradited and is allowed to stay in an ultra-luxurious custom-built prison, from which be can continue his “business” operations. He wants this not just for himself but for the huge section of the Colombian population now involved in the culture of the cocaine business. The left-wing MIG guerrillas have been welcomed back into traditional politics, even into the government. Why should the drug barons not receive a similar amnesty?The President has a difficult decision to make. He has promised the Americans that he will extradite any captured drug baron for trial in the US.

So to help him make up his mind in favour of an amnesty, Escobar kidnaps all these famous people. A cross between Svengali and Robin Hood, he too has politicians and lawyers at his disposal. He champions the poor and, at the height of his splendour, people put up altars with his picture and lit candles to him in the slums of Medellin. “The only thing wrong with him”, Marquez notes caustically, is “his total inability to distinguish between good and evil.”After years on the margins of polite society, Escobar needs to make peace and enjoy his ill-gotten gains. This old elite is being challenged by the “new money” associated with the drug barons, whose influence spreads to all sectors of society.Hovering over the book, shadowy and mysterious, is the figure of Pablo Escobar.

The President is involved, and so too are a trio of ex-presidents, a bevy of lawyers, a handful of ambassadors, the inevitable priest, and the owners of the papers and TV stations.These various personal dramas take place against the wider disaster of the country’s political breakdown. This is familiar ground, not just in Colombia, and it is done with admirable tact and restraint. More original material comes with the story of the influential friends and relations who frenetically pull every string they can think of.The release of the hostages must be secured, yet no one wants the army’s special SAS-trained units to go rushing in and cause a bloodbath. The hostages, after all, belong to the topmost pinnacle of the country’s political elite. Beginning and ending (90 minutes later) in stillness, it progresses through a series of disparate sequences that bring contrasts of shape and colour in the dancers’ clothes: black to start and finish, then some white, and reds and yellows in the climactic central part.Occasionally the movement is almost balletic, parts are eccentric (for instance, the man who repeatedly runs on for twitchy jumps as if jerked on an invisible puppet string); most often it comprises a rhythmic stepping, varied in pace and place to which the performers give a dedicated intensity that helped explain the rapturous ovation from a packed house.I note with admiration the generosity of Issey Miyake Inc in supporting the London presentation, even though the costume designs are not theirs but by Teshigawara, who is responsible for scenography, the excellent lighting and a share of the music compilation besides the choreography and being one of the dancers – a polymath indeed..

The nearest we get to such encumbrances is when three men briefly wheel on metal frames that made me think of a cross between hospital bed and a market stall, and the main point of them seemed to be that they were empty (another indication of space).So the concern is almost entirely with movement, which brings out Teshigawara’s sculptural as well as his choreographic side. Two of the other kidnapped women are closely related to a recently assassinated presidential candidate for whom, fortunately, there is no ready English parallel.The book details how they are kidnapped, the dire conditions in which they are held, and what they think and feel. In British terms, it would be as though the IRA had seized Carol Thatcher, Elspeth Howe and Max Hastings, and held them in safe houses in various parts of the country for several months. This may be fact, but for British readers there is an inevitable echo of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.
Among those kidnapped are the daughter of a former president who runs a television programme, the wife of a senior minister in the previous government, and the editor of a leading newspaper. The action takes place at a crucial historical moment when a new government is seeking to negotiate an end to a civil war between the drug lords and the army.