Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish director and proponent of 'poor theatre', whose writing provided McBurney with an introduction to experimental theatre, also died. As did Dadie Rylands, the Bloomsbury charmer and Shakespearean scholar, who directed John Gielgud in Hamlet.
Rylands, part of a different theatrical tradition, would stand onstage with his back to the cast, his face sunk in a play-text, to be lifted only when he heard a faulty cadence. But he was a friend of McBurney's and helped him to get to Lecoq's school in Paris. Theatre de Complicite have been leavening the British stage for 15 years. They have brought to it an expressive fluidity of movement, the powerful sense of a close-knit company - and, lately, a fascination with a darkly absurd vein of European literature. The Street of Crocodiles, first staged at the National seven years ago, and now at the Queen's after a world tour, is a perfect projection of the company's talents.
In adapting stories by Bruno Schulz, Mark Wheatley and the show's director Simon McBurney, have found a subject which doesn't merely fit their style: it explains and declares it. Schulz's stories are dark, rich, cabbalistic and densely metaphorical. They conjure up a world full of unsuspected animation, in which people and objects are continually changing shapes. It is a world in which 'there is no dead matter'.
Complicite transmits the volatility of these tales with a shifting soundscape - marching footsteps, a tango, Janacek strings - and a cast who are infinitely pliable and always cohesive. No one moves in isolation: seeing the company together is like watching the Mexican wave of a football crowd: scurryings and flutters ripple across the stage. One woman stirs a bowl; across the way, another uses the same circular gesture as she mops a floor - it is as if they were covered by one invisible skin. These actors suggest something of Schulz's drawings of mournful Jewish, Pale of Settlement manikins, with their large heads and dangling limbs.
They also manage to make powerful what looks on the page like an impenetrable script, with jumps in action, and speeches in German and Spanish. Schulz had something in common with Kafka - he translated The Trial - and with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Born in 1892 in East Galicia, later part of Poland, Schulz wrote stories commemorating an intense and bizarre family life: his father, a textile merchant, became an invalid and an obsessional recluse. He worked for a time in a library under Gestapo authority, deciding which books should be destroyed and which retained and catalogued. He was shot by a Nazi officer in 1942.
The Street of Crocodiles envisages some of these events. It opens in smoke and darkness, with a figure walking with confident steadiness, like a fly, down a wall, and with personages squeezing themselves out of water butt and cistern; at the front of the stage, a single figure sits reading. It proceeds with a virtuosity that is never obtrusive, because it is perfectly matched to its subject. Books and black umbrellas flap open and shut to become birds; wooden chairs are inverted to make a cluster of bare trees; long rows of books suddenly topple, domino-like, from high shelves on to the floor. It ends with the protagonist being passed, like a baby, between the members of his family.
Kathryn Hunter, for a long time associated with Complicite as an actress, brings some of the company's virtues to her work as a director. Her production of Rebecca Gilman's new play, The Glory of Living, at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs is bold and direct; no one struts or fusses. There is a willingness, unusual in the theatre, to use a soundtrack - of country music, with its bad times and queasy moral precepts. There is a bracing use of unexpected perspectives: the bed of a jangling couple stands upright, as if propped against a non-existent wall.
Gilman's play is gripping. In telling its story of a teenager - brought up in a trailer in Tennessee, the daughter of a prostitute, who falls for a vicious man and, under his influence, takes up killing - it never explains, but mimics the blankness of its protagonist. She carries out her murders calmly, confesses her crime as if pleased to be of interest, and greets the news of a death sentence almost shruggingly. This is the profile of someone who gives herself up at every opportunity to please someone else. It is a taut piece which rings true and doesn't patronise.
The Glory of Living has one false note: a sentimental ending. It has two terrific performances, from Monica Dolan as the gawky, susceptible, dangerous girl, and Tony Curran as her self-intoxicated lover. Liz Cook's bare design economically suggests a series of provisional interiors, and an enduring, large landscape.
There is another short play by a gifted writer at the Bush. Charlotte Jones's In Flame suffers from an over-familiar feminist structure: the lives of two women, separated by two generations, are seen in parallel, with sisterhood whispering down the years. Its strength lies in shrewd comic writing and unpredictable outbursts of non-verbal activity: two of its most revealing and dramatically daring moments are prolonged dances, one by a predatory man; the other by an elderly, apparently passive woman.
Marcia Warren, rousing herself from sharp-tongued disability to become the aged tapper - with her ironic rolls of the wrists and her insouciant heel clicks - is outstanding.
