Chouf Ouchouf, Queen Elizabeth Hall

If you’re looking for a surprising and off-the-wall show this school holidays, I’ve no hesitation in hugely recommending Chouf Ouchouf, a brilliantly and theatrically inventive acrobat theatre show performed by the Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier, a troupe of Moroccan acrobats who learned their awesome skills on Tangier Beach. Through the wit and imagination of its Swiss theatre directors, the show manages to retain a lively street smell and yet pull off some deft theatrical effects, blurring the edges between normality and strangeness - one moment you feel you might be walking in a souk, the next you’ve been sucked into a darkling, ghostly world of surreal human balancing acts.

Some inventive and evocative thought has gone into the setting, which is at first very much a no-nonsense street scene, with the 11 performers in scruffy clothes and dusty galabiyehs by a beige wall. Music pounds from the speakers, a pleasant Arab rap with an echoey, urban beat. Initially the game seems to be how many different ways to stack 10 people into a pyramid. They screech with happiness as they pull each stunt off, appealing to us to applaud like buskers wanting baksheesh. It’s very amiable, but you might wonder how they’ll get a 70-minute show out of this.

Then the whole thing suddenly goes literally off the wall, as the corner of the medina breaks up into towers 12 ft high that start to float about, vacuuming up people or dropping them off in the street in enigmatic poses. Activities become less clown-like, more poetic, more mime theatre. Figures seem to fly suddenly up on top of the moving towers, and fall flat backwards off them. Cellulose goods bags scuttle around. A boneless man in green cut-offs seizes the least likely, most nonchalant purchases to do an instant handstand - with one hand around a girl’s neck, another on her knee, for example - handstands designed not for some choreographic symmetry but for unpredictability, destability, to take you off-balance.

They tumble weightlessly like jumping fleas, they trampoline off a tarpaulin held by their friends, they noisily hawk T-shirts; they line up against a wall, loitering, then subtly fall in a domino effect - catching the action at the end and sending it back again in little judders, making the children in the audience giggle. They chant a chorus vehemently with serious faces, striding around the stage, with outbursts of animal noises, squeals, cuckoos, roars, even farts - silly stuff. Yet when the wall reassembles and pushes the line of them reluctantly to the very front of the stage, and they’re singing at us, what is that urgent chant? Is this a protest song?

The acrobatics are deceptively rough-finished, as if casually erupting from the pavement out of nowhere, but the timing is as fastidious as fine ballet. And this is a more dynamic use of the wall motif than either of the much-lauded sets by Anthony Gormley for the Tibetan monks’ Sutra and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Babel (words) - this wall really has been imagined and constructed into a mysterious and potently dramatic container and engine for the human activities, not as a chic accesssory.

Multiple cheers to the Moroccan performers, several of whom belong to the eminent acrobatics Hammich dynasty (seven generations of them), and a lot of whom took their first tumbles on Tangier’s main beach, where this daring athletic tradition is honed. But the credit for turning their astounding skills to such stylish theatrical effect goes to the Swiss theatre directors Dimitri de Perrot and Martin Zimmermann, and their design and sound team. This is one acrobatic show that punches well above its weight in ingenuity and theatrical aplomb. "Chouf ouchouf" means "look, and look again" - and I'd very happily ouchouf this show again.

• Chouf Ouchouf is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London today at 4pm; then Hall for Cornwall, Truro, Thursday & Friday; Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, 2–4 May; Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome, as part of Brighton Festival, 7-9 May; Norwich Theatre Royal as part of Norfolk & Norwich Festival, 13-14 May

Watch a snatch of Tangier Beach acrobats

Watch the trailer for Chouf Ouchouf