A re-styling of the polish film Teorema encourages theatre to strive harder after beauty, philosophy and opacity. Rating: * * *

Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph

“Polish theatre is the most exciting theatre in the world at the moment”, Loughlin Deegan, the director of the Dublin Theatre Festival recently told me - explaining why he had programmed a whole slew of Polish work as part of this year’s line-up. You’ll get some idea of what he’s talking about if you rush to catch one of the shows he included this year by the revered director Grzegorz Jarzyna of TR Warsawa.

It’s a shame Jarzyna’s treatment of the 1968 Pier Paulo Pasolini film Teorema - here re-styled T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T - has only visited the Barbican Centre for the briefest of runs. It clearly requires considerable logistical effort to stage. The repressed bourgeois Milanese household whose occupants yield, one by one, to the irresistible advances of a mysterious young stranger - played in the film by Terence Stamp - has been realised on a lavish scale by Magdalena Maciejewska.

There’s a vast expanse of living-room interior for the characters to pad about in - a desolate arena for wordless flirtations, idiosyncratic mating rituals and moments of off-kilter abandonment.

Large windows, draped with translucent curtains, suggest an outside world into which the immediate family of a greying industrialist, forever preening themselves, is too self-preoccupied to step. The palatial, otherworldly dimensions allow you to read this not as a minor domestic upheaval but as a broad social critique of people stifled by material well-being who are shaken out of their reverie by a confrontation with the embodiment of the enlightenment they lack.

In a way - and this is something such a short run works against - it makes most sense to see the piece twice. Once, without acquainting - or reacquainting - yourself with the Pasolini original, so that you feel the full force of the evening’s enigmatic atmosphere. Then, once again, with prior reference to the film, because Jarzyna is responding to Pasolini’s poetic “theory” about society with an experiment of his own, to discover whether there’s a valid theatrical correlative to the Italian’s unhurried, painterly form of cinema.

That’s not to say that it’s so good, you’ve got to keep going back. Running to more than two hours without interval, I felt there were too many longueurs to hold irritation at bay indefinitely, but the self-certainty of Jarzyna’s aesthetic fascinates - and the rigorous, quasi scientific, air of purpose throws down the gauntlet to theatre here to strive harder after beauty, philosophy and even opacity.