Tale of ordinary farming volk

In just 60 minutes this 1972 work by Franz Xaver Kroetz paints a startling picture of family life more complete and detailed than many playwrights would manage in double the running time.

Through a series of short, laconic and occasionally elliptical scenes, he depicts an intriguing cycle of despair slowly thawing into hope in the lives of some poor German farming folk.

Beppi, an animated, affectionate, if somewhat retarded teenager, has undoubtedly been dealt one of life's bum hands. She ekes out a joy-free existence with her stern father and boot-faced old trout of a mother on the family holding and endures daily sneers about how "backward" she is. Labourer Sepp is the only one to show her kindness, yet his motives are anything but altruistic.

Maria Aberg's elegant production is rendered visually impressive by a clever lighting scheme that indicates on which part of the opened-out stage the
next piece of stop-start action will unfold. But good design would count for nothing in this piece were it not for Matti Houghton's courageous performance as Beppi.

As well as coping admirably with Kroetz's graphic depictions of sex and other bodily functions, Houghton raises the requisite level of doubt in audience minds. Is Sepp sexually exploiting Beppi's naivety? Or is he introducing her to a whole new enticing world of possibility, light years away from her frigid, Ten Commandment-sobsessed family?

The hard-won smile that mother Stallerin (Alwyne Taylor) gives her daughter at the end suggests a tentative case for optimism.

Until 21 January (08700 601761).

Stallerhof