Horror that may not shock

PIP Simmons is coming to town with his heart-breaking, gutwrenching and mind-opening theatre piece, An Die Musik. It caused outrage when it burst upon the London fringe 25 years ago. I know, I was there for the first performance; its blow-torch intensity has accompanied me over the intervening quarter-century.

An Die Musik escapes categories. It's about the Holocaust, but only one, almost marginal, aspect of it: Jewish musicians forced to play German classical music for concentration camp guards after a hard day's killing. This is a horrible, grating irony, perhaps a small outrage compared to the murder industry we have been forced to confront in Schindler's List, Holocaust museums, and the libel trial defeat of David Irving.

Yet Simmons asks a huge question: where does civilisation end and barbarity begin? Auschwitz orchestras playing Schubert (whose song To Music gives the piece its title) or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony put a question mark against the entire edifice of classical European culture. When the masterpieces of classical music become the recreation of torturers, could there be something wrong with high culture? If there were any justice, after An Die Musik, Classic FM would never sound the same again.

The piece coming to London is from a different world from today's celebrity-festooned theatre and has evolved from the improvised original.

By 1975, Simmons was the firebrand of Britain's high-octane alternative theatre. The People Show (whose one-time actor and trumpeter Mike Figgis is reinventing film-making with Time Code), Joint Stock, Red Ladder, 7:84, Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre and many other insolent, inventive, nomadic troupes set up shop, often on stages or streets where rock musicians strutted their stuff, and tore away the masks of our lives and times. The weapons of their moral ferocity were theatricality and comedy, song and dance, scenic surrealism, an insolence and inventiveness that came as much from The Goon Show as Brecht.

Simmons was the most brazen and daring. Grandson of Jews from Poland and Galicia, he looked and sounded like a cross between an East-End cabbie and Saddam Hussein. With his Zapata moustache and gravelly voice, he could have been a Latin American guerrillero, but he was as London and as confrontational as Mick Jagger. When I went to his Black And White Minstrel Show, a grotesque assault on racism, at Oval House in Kennington, I found myself hand-cuffed at the interval to a blacked-up actor who followed me to the bar like a bowing and scraping human rebuke, answering "Yes, Massah" to everything I said.

An Die Musik was even more furious and confrontational. Its first part was an operetta, The Dream of Anne Frank: the mythifying of Anne Frank into the heroine of a Broadway tear-jerker, was another target of Simmons's ruthless stripping of emotional alibis. It was set around a Friday- evening Jewish Sabbath table, with candlesticks and blessings, challah and kiddush wine. As the actors performed Chris Jordan's piercing, haunting melodies, an SS guard stripped them of jewellery, candlesticks and cutlery.

In the second part, Simmons staged the degradation of the inmates with a brutality just this side of tolerable. It began as a prisoners' concert, a display of European Jewish culture - traditional music and dance, old Yiddish comedy routines, Shylock's speech on being a Jew. They played the Romantic tenderness of Schubert's To Music, Beethoven's stirring Ode to Joy - Alle Menschen Werden Brueder, all men shall be brothers. Then, the Nazi commandant donned a gas mask, clouds of white smoke surrounded them, and they played the funeral march until the gas clouds covered them.

I can still hear the sweet-sour, rough-edged sound they made. It broke your heart and made you rage, it hammered into your mind with its simplicity, beauty and pain.

Simmons had always been an outsider - An Die Musik was commissioned by Dutch theatres. "It was possible to take such risks then," he says. "We were outside the theatre, and against society. I was a lunatic at the time, angry about everything. An Die Musik was a shout against hippie glibness, the self-congratulatory, complacent mood of the times."