Ablaze with imagination

No one blazes a trail of theatrical excitement and thrilling invention quite like the Icelandic actor-director Gisli Orn Gardarsson. Having astonished us with a Romeo and Juliet at the Young Vic in which actors swinging on ropes and trapezes captured that play's sense of sexual elation, danger and restriction, Gardarsson now dreams up a Woyzeck, similarly ablaze with imagistic surprises, trapezes and shocks.

His techniques suit the style of Georg Büchner's early 19th-century kalaidoscope of tragic fragments. Woyzeck, the sensitive soldier who stabs his faithless girl to death, experiences life through a glass darkly in spasms of hallucinating dread. Büchner sparked the first modern drama, an expressionstic nightmare of cruelty and revenge.

Gardarsson offers a contemporary response to Büchner's original, with a hypnotic and continual musical score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis that ranges from rock 'n' roll to hot gospel singing. Most of Büchner's text vanishes.

Gardarsson provocatively rips out the dysfunctional Barbican proscenium. A huge, high open-stage is created. The audience, steeply raked on three sides, looks down on a structure of silver pipes, grass adorned with artifical flowers and a narrow water-trough that fringes the action. These elements reflect the scope and weirdness of Büchner's vision.

The stage, with its blackgarbed choir and trapeze artists, is startled by flashes of the surreal and the bizarrrely menacing. The production - spoken in English - conveys a sense of humanity beset by murderousness. Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson's thuggish Drum Major swings flamboyantly upside down on a trapeze before he makes up to Nina Dogg Filippusdottir's Maria. Woyzeck inflicts a horrifying death by drowning her, forcing her down and down again in pink water.

The scene is ominously anticipated in a torture scene: liquid is poured into a glass bowl wedged upon one fearful face that takes on a bloated look.

Ingvar E Sigurdsson's disturbed Woyzeck in blue jeans and several blue funks is violently beaten up by the Drum Major to an accompaniment of music whose gentle, muted ripples are akin to dying heart-beats. Some fantastic evening.

Until 22 October. Information: 0845 120 7515.

Woyzeck