Theatre venues are never the ideal place to catch hip-swivellingly brilliant African ensembles, even when they are fronted by one of the continent's greatest singers. Malian diva Oumou Sangare could have taken matters into her own hands in Liverpool and just commanded the audience to get up and dance from the beginning. As it was she waited for over an hour, perhaps not realising that an English crowd always need coaxing before it will let itself go.

She arrived in a dazzling purple dress, her keening voice rising above the spidery guitar lines and hypnotic hand drums. Two backing singers emitted piercing staccato phrases, the one-stringed fiddle zinged eerily and the hunter's loot played mind-bending rhythms. But the diva herself seemed rather detached, staying away from the edge of the stage, making eye contact with her band far more than with her audience.

The extreme specificity of Sangare's subject matter perhaps makes it hard for her to address a foreign crowd. She introduced her songs in French, and many covered such topics as arranged marriages and the evils of polygamy. Yet, if she had any concerns about establishing audience empathy, she seemed reluctant to compensate with displays of physical performance. At one point she did start whirling beautifully across the stage, but it turned out she was in fact dancing off into the wings for a gratuitous 15-minute costume change. In her absence the band played endlessly around one riff and the audience visibly fidgeted in their chairs.

Finally Sangare returned and asked the crowd to get up and dance. They joyfully did, and with the evening's end in sight, the concert at last became a party.