Well, this is a challenge, and a gruelling one. Howard Barker gives little away in his latest vision of hell on earth, one of those theatrical experiences where everyone around you seems to be genuflecting at the altar of radical theatre, while you are left scratching your head and feeling like a bear of very little brain.
There are no bears here, but there are three howling mechanical dogs that belong to a senile judge who once presided over the execution of 38 war criminals at Nuremburg and who now appears to be consuming their body parts for lunch. His only regret is that he didn't get to meet Hitler.
So he whiles away the time before death in burning the books in his vast library. The teenage librarian makes feeble protest, has sex with the judge's daughter and contracts a spine-twisting disease as if he has assumed the physical manifestation of this distorted world. The smoke rises from a pit as if from hell itself, and so far they are only up to G in the burning. It takes two hours (no interval) to get to Z and fulfill the judge's ambition to chat with Hitler.
A case of undoubted, indeed mesmerising style over meaning, the show has a cool catwalk shimmer and some very doubtful sexual politics in its portrayal of women: the urinating nurses seem to have stepped straight out of a Carry On film; there is a half-naked headless woman; and the judge's daughter is a raving nymphomaniac.
The whole thing reeks brilliantly of sex and death and, as ever, Barker prods at the worm of private desires eating away at the public face of history. It feels both monumental and unassailable, like a vast piece of theatrical granite. If only Barker would allow us near.
