Franz Xaver Kroetz's 1972 play is so hard it hurts. It is like granite, as grey and unyielding as the lives of the Staller family who eke out a living on a farm not far from Munich but entirely untouched by Germany's postwar economic miracle. The farmer and his wife are hard-working, pious people of few words. The burden they bear is their only child, the teenager Beppi, a disappointment because she was not a boy, is of low IQ and can see almost nothing without her glasses. Frau Staller's face looks like the north face of the Eiger, perpetually set against adversity and her own daughter.
Kroetz's play - given an extraordinarily assured and uncompromising production by young director Maria Aberg - is about seeing and not seeing, speaking and not speaking and how, when your life is linguistically, politically and spiritually impoverished, one thing follows another as surely as night follows day. "And then?" asks young Beppi when Sepp, the hired farm hand who dreams of the city and escape from this life of orders and toil, tells her stories of a world beyond Stallerhof. And then indeed, for language and stories soon prove as seductive as a rare day out at the fair to Beppi, and the presence of the girl too much of a temptation to Sepp, whose previous only release has been through masturbation.
Chilling though it is, Kroetz's wintry tale is no predictable child-abuse saga. It begins with an act of compassion as Sepp cleans the soiled Beppi, and while there are many forms of exploitation and cruelty here, there is also tenderness in the desperation and a release from lives that know no pleasure. In the Stallers' world sex is for procreation, food is to keep you alive and the radio is switched off if music is playing. Watching Sepp and Beppi is like watching people clinging together on a rope over a 1,000ft drop.
Southwark Playhouse, a place of light and shadows, provides the perfect setting, and Naomi Dawson's beautiful design transforms it into simultaneous interiors and exteriors. Kroetz's hyper-realism allows no trickery and the acting is exceptional, particularly Matti Houghton, as Beppi, who gives a central performance of terrifying fearlessness and truth. The play is an hour long, but you feel as if you have lived a lifetime.
· Until January 21. Box office: 08700 601 761.
