These pieces are brought to London by Poland's Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices: an experimental troupe which has had a huge influence on several of our practitioners, including Katie Mitchell and Kneehigh's Emma Rice. While I wouldn't pretend to understand everything they do, it is difficult to resist their energetic exuberance.
Metamorphoses is based on Apuleius's The Golden Ass; what it offers is less a linear narrative than a visual and musical interpretation of the story. The hee-hawing central figure, accidentally transformed into a donkey, seems robustly kin to Bottom the weaver. Diaphanously draped girls gyrate like Isadora Duncan, wail like migrant birds, and play folk-harmonium and cello. And some contrast is clearly drawn between "dancing Dionysos and suffering Christ" with a single pole symbolising the former's giant phallus and the latter's cross. I found it wild, high-spirited, likeable and, despite bursts of fractured English, largely incomprehensible.
With Elektra we are on more familiar ground. The company's director, Wlodzimierz Staniewski, offers a prefatory chat telling us "the best guide to olden times is gossip"; among the titbits he offers is that during Greek performances of The Suppliants the actors' cries allegedly caused children to faint and women to miscarry. What follows is an attempt to re-create the emotionally indicative gestures and the atmosphere of ecstatic abandonment.
Central is the idea Elektra was raped by her mother's lover, Aegisthus, and this fuelled her revenge. And what we see, through mime and hyperactive dance, is the graphic violation of the heroine and an orgy of murder by Pylades. This is the antithesis of our idea of Greek tragedy: gestures are expansively large, music plays constantly and swords are wielded with the dexterity of Chinese acrobats.
It would, one feels, be even more instructive to see the company playing in its isolated barn in rural Poland. But what impresses is the company's mixture of discipline and energy. Above all, they remind us that Greek tragedy was intended as an all-out, total theatre experience rather than a restrained poetic event. And, while one grasps only part of the meaning, the result is like watching Euripides by flashes of lightning and explains why this dynamic troupe has had such an influence on our own young directors.
· Until Feb 11. Box office: 0856 120 7500
