In Stifters Dinge, there is no stage as such. We see the entire shell of the Merlyn Theatre exposed, as I have never seen it before. The audience of about one hundred and fifty is a marginal presence at the edge of this mysterious space. The claim that Stifters Dinge is ‘a performance without performers’ is not quite true. At the beginning, two ‘stagehands’ make a kind of ceremony out of sprinkling salt on the three dry pool beds that take up much of the theatre space; they then turn on the water, which slowly spreads out over the white surface of salt in trickling patterns. There is also a human presence in the soundtrack, which ranges from an excerpt from Adalbert Stifter’s Erzählungen (The Ice Tale) to a subtitled interview with Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist who disliked fieldwork and was more concerned with theory than with people and things.

Stifter (1805–68) was a Romantic Austrian writer, little known outside the German-speaking world (though W.H. Auden was an admirer). In an interview, Goebbels cheerfully remarks that Stifter is not popular with young readers today because the narrative flow of his stories is frequently interrupted by painstaking description of landscape and nature, but it is precisely this obsession with detailed observation of environment and surroundings that draws him to the writer. Stifter’s ‘things’, which range from ice falls and thunderstorms to objects and, indeed, even people from different cultural backgrounds, provide the starting point for this ‘performance’, but there is no attempt at literal transposition. There is, however, a program, a sequence of phenomena: the release of the water, ‘a ballet of curtains’, which reflects patterns on the water, gentle rain, beautiful dry ice clouds eddying across the water surface. And we are teased with details from Ucello’s Night hunt on a small shifting screen suspended from above.

Then there are the pianos. At the far end of the theatre, quite a distance from the audience at first, is a strange ‘set’ (somehow the inverted commas seem necessary) comprising five partly deconstructed player pianos encased in a suggestion of almost Petty-like machinery against a background of bare trees. At one point, we hear one of the pianos soulfully playing a fragment of Bach’s Italian Concerto from across the water. Later, the ‘set’, which we now appreciate is in three sections, each on wheels, advances slowly and ominously on rails towards the audience, the five pianos now going berserk and emitting a cacophony of frantic noise. Finally, the ‘set’ literally takes a bow, a sarcastic gesture which carries an edge of threat.

It is a mesmerising piece of theatre. Asked by an interviewer about the lack of a human presence in Stifters Dinge, Goebbels insists that it is provided by the audience. And it is significant that at the end of the performance the audience is invited down to inspect the installation, and, in that sense, to become part of it. We are allowed to see the ‘things’ stripped of their mystery.

One’s suspicions about Lepage’s The Blue Dragon should have been raised by the festival booklet, which promised the audience ‘a magical journey to modern China for a heart-wrenching love story’. My heart remained stubbornly unwrenched throughout. Set in Shanghai, the ‘love story’ follows the amatory fortunes of a gallery-owning Canadian expatriate, a character, it seems, from an earlier trilogy; it is, as critic Alison Croggon puts it, ‘pure soap opera’. The scenic effects, carefully contained within the proscenium arch, range from the playful (a model bullet train wending its way across the stage against a toy city background) to the dramatic, with the sudden materialisation of a railway station or airport, complete with a bustle of shadowy figures. All this is achieved with superb efficiency. But to what purpose? For some reason, the scene changes are accompanied by explosions of thunder and lightning, which might have had some point if the story had opted for high melodrama rather than downbeat romance. We are offered three possible endings to the story, as if this were an unprecedented coup de théâtre. At the curtain call, the three actors are joined by the dozen or so stage crew, which tells us that the technology is there to be applauded in its own right.

Heiner Goebbels, Stifter's Dinge (Stifter's Things), the CUB Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre. Photograph by Mario Del Curto

Conor Lovett gives an astonishing performance in The Beckett Trilogy. Technically, it is a prose recital, for it is on this basis that the Beckett Estate has given permission for the novels – Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953) – to be presented on stage. As it happens, the minimal staging is entirely appropriate – just an austere circle of light for Molloy and Malone Dies, with Lovett making his entrance from the audience; and in The Unnamable a brutal shaft of light from a spotlight positioned on the floor, casting a huge, ominous shadow of the performer onto a scrim. Lovett inhabits these confined spaces with ease and assurance, even as he conveys the presence of characters lacking in both. Molloy, with its distinctively Irish brand of humour, is the most accessible, while The Unnamable is the most demanding for both performer and audience. It has been debated whether it is a linguistic cul-de-sac or a linguistic tour de force – in a sense it is both, as the unnamed narrator struggles with the bonds of language (‘I’m in words, made of words’). All this is punctuated with devastating silences, which threaten to consume us. That one critic developed a migraine does not surprise me; I was overcome with a feeling akin to claustrophobia. The classic Beckett ending – ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ – comes as a considerable relief.

What would Beckett have made of this recital? He was notorious for being a stickler for the text and nothing but the text. He might well have had problems with the reduction of his novels to excerpts, carefully chosen though they may be. And Lovett’s actorly use of movement and gesture might have worried him. According to Peter Hall, who directed Happy Days, Beckett at rehearsals was disturbed by ‘the slightest sign of feeling’ and wanted ‘monotony, paleness, weakness’. On the other hand, Thomas Cousineau, in After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (1999), argues that ‘the most effective way to gain access to the experience of The Unnamable is, following the lead of the narrator, to perform the text. The reader must put aside the ambition of “interpreting” the text in the sense of translating it into the language of rational comprehension and strive, rather, to interpret it as an actor does when interpreting a role.’ Which is exactly what Conor Lovett was doing on our behalf.

In his ‘conversation’ with Amanda Smith (which was advertised as the John Sumner Lecture), Albee revealed that the first production of his first play, The Zoo Story, in 1959 took place in Berlin, in German, paired with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, as it was again in its first American production at Provincetown the following year. Albee has said that ‘with a good play – anybody’s good play – seeing it on stage is merely a proof of what exists on the page and not an improvement on it’, and that ‘no performance is as good as the performance the author saw when he wrote [the play]’. This is perhaps the most extreme claim for the supremacy of the author’s text, and it is significant that Albee, like Beckett, has at times directed his own plays, as if he is in the best position to provide that proof.

Theatre, by its very nature, has always concerned itself with the effects of stage presentation. One thinks of nineteenth-century pantomime, with its magical transformation scenes, or indeed of that other nineteenth-century behemoth, grand opera. Yet Verdi’s Aida, one of the ‘grandest’ of that breed, famous for its splendid triumphal march, with extras galore, ends with Aida and Radamès in the confined space of the tomb, Amneris above them. Opera, with the transformative power of music, has always been capable of the zoom lens effect. Robert Lepage’s Blue Dragon disappoints because the technology, whatever visual pleasures it offers, is at the service of a banal script. Stifters Dinge can be read in different ways, and Heiner Goebbels makes a point of giving the audience that choice. But its power surely derives from the juxtaposition of technology and nature, while the ghostly absence of actors and pianists reminds us of their usual presence. And perhaps Goebbels is also arguing that theatre can do ‘installations’ much better than the often tedious stuff you see cobbled together in art galleries. The Beckett Trilogy, however, pares theatre down to its bare essentials – one man on an empty stage communicating with a live audience. That Conor Lovett was reciting a modern classic was a bonus.