This utterly charming piece will speak to anyone who’s ever found themselves in the iron grip of a temporary speech impediment when faced with the object of their sexual ambition.

If there is such a thing as screwball romantic dance theatre, former Rambert dancer Ted Stoffer has created it here, exploring our boundless potential for incomprehensible blathering and smitten inability to get our point across.

The title itself is a conflation of aphasia – the inability to express or understand thought in words – and aphrodisiac (anyone who has forced a partner to wolf down oysters in the name of “romance” will know what this means).

The piece opened with a couple, each walling themselves within a tower of enormous Jenga blocks. Much of Aphasiadisiac relies on this kind of graceful, perilous physical comedy more often seen in silent movies.

The couple then climbed to the top of their self-made towers so they could be thrown more bricks before reaching for one another in one of the show’s many tender moments.

Later, a creepy-looking backwards-dressed girl became the subject of a protracted wooing, a couple found their own language of love in a snare drum, while another pair of lovers were pursued about the stage by a previously inanimate brick.

The wonderfully carnivalesque, Slavic/bossanova soundtrack, composed by the cast, was performed by the stony-faced dancers on accordion, saxophone and a vertical drumkit fastened to the wall at the back of the stage – a wall the drummer had cannonballed through moments earlier, impersonating a crazed estate agent.

The disparate sequences didn’t always sit together and were frequently bizarre and baffling (in a good way).

But after centuries of written attempts to navigate the confusion of love, a dancer fellating a drumstick seems as good an expression of this conundrum as any other.