Arts: Theatre - The sombre and the skittish in stark contrast

Theatre; BLACK ON WHITE LIFT BARBICAN LONDON

"NEW BALLS, please" is a common enough cry at this time of year: It's just not a request you'd normally associate with a concert hall. But you half expected someone to bark out such an order at the start of Black on White, a piece by the German experimental composer, Heiner Goebbels, which was brought to the Barbican as one of the final events in this year's London International Festival of Theatre. As the 18 members of the Ensemble Modern pour on to the starkly illuminated stage, their warming up techniques aren't confined to their instruments. Deranged games of shuttlecock break out. Yellow tennis balls are hurled at a metal thunder sheet which, when struck, responds with a satisfyingly angry, apocalyptic rumble. It's a larky, bemusing opening to a powerful, if hard-to- define experience in which the sombre and the skittish are often arrestingly confused.

Eighty minutes after this prelude, in the show's most haunting stretch, the entire ensemble sits in absorbed silence and watches a pendulum trail back and forth across the strings of a Japanese koto, producing a trembling unearthly music. The sound and the image here have a disconcerting beauty - at once intensely human and apparently independent of human agency; a mechanical timepiece and an emblem of immemorial ghostly grieving. By this stage, the warring elements (the individual spirit versus soulless regimentation) fragilely reconciled in that sequence, have come into repeated conflict. Lit by baleful bulbs, Jean Kalman's design covers the stage with severe ranks of school benches whose silhouettes at one point move with looming implacability across a set of screens like an advancing army. Assertions of individuality range from the rumly eccentric (as when a lone piccolo player pipes his way through a poignant, questioning lament in an odd-couple duet with the kettle he's bringing to the boil for a cup of tea) to the fiercely defiant (as when an impassioned saxophonist frenetically scrawls dissident and dissonant musical graffiti over the dogmatic two-chord blare of the brass section.)

Drawing on a vast stock of instruments and styles (including hot, growling jazz and pre-recorded industrial rhythms against which the string players saw their jagged ripostes), the piece features spoken passages in German, French and English. In one sequence, a young woman hurdles several times to a microphone to yell out the lines in The Waste Land, where Eliot alludes to Webster and to the vulnerability of buried corpses: "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, / or with his nails he'll dig it up again." The repetition and wacky, indecorous progress across the stage give the moment a black farcicality. Unfortunately, how this quotation fits into the show's preoccupation with elegy is the problem you would need to have both excellent hearing and very good German to solve. For the extracts from the work of Goebbels's late colleague, the playwright Heiner Muller, are unexplained by either surtitles or programme notes.

It was Eliot who said that worthwhile poetry communicates before it is properly understood and, as a whole, Black on White bears out the truth of this proposition. But a little linguistic light would not have come amiss.