Cameron Woodhead

By Henrik Ibsen. Adapted by Mat Sweeney and Jesse Rasmussen. Four Larks Theatre, Richmond, until tomorrow Running time: 85 minutes fourlarkstheatre.com

PEER Gynt is notoriously difficult to stage, largely because it wasn't written with the stage in mind. A sprawling fantasy in verse, the play features trolls and shipwrecks, monsters and adventure. It presents many technical challenges. Some of these Ibsen resolved through music, commissioning Edvard Grieg to compose a score that has become arguably more famous than the play itself.

Four Larks Theatre, a company of young artists from Australia, the US and Britain, takes a leaf out of Ibsen's book. Music is key to its enchanting production.

Most of the performers double as musicians, and some scenes are memorably captured in song: Solveig (Kate Berry) and her sister (Ramona Ray-Greig) join in haunting folk harmonies; an all-male vocal quintet sings of Peer's stint as a Moroccan businessman; and the Statue of Memnon (Genevieve & Jezabel) comes to life in a hypnotising solo harp performance.

By necessity, the play is heavily cut. Occasionally this reduces it to pantomime - as with the caricatured portrayals of Anitra (Chris Hewitt) and Peer's mother Ase (Caitlin Williams). But more often than not this is a virtue. The direction (Mat Sweeney and Jesse Rasmussen) is taut and imaginative.

Given the resources they had, this Peer Gynt is an extraordinary achievement. Four Larks is a team of theatre-makers to watch.

THEATRE REVIEW: AVAST: A MUSICAL WITHOUT MUSIC The Black Lung Theatre, Upstairs @ Kent Street Bar, 201 Smith Street, Collingwood, until May 20 Running time: 40 minutes

THE Black Lung Theatre is a new space. It promises to be a site where almost anything is possible. Its inaugural production, Avast, is a bewildering and unkempt bit of fringe. The title - a nautical word meaning "stop or desist" - plagues the mind during this merciless spectacle.

Only theatrical convention stops you screaming it from the forward deck. But you could, for Avast is theatre that breaks rules.

The show concerns two demented brothers (Thomas Wright and Gareth Davies), whose whaler dad (Dylan Young) has died. Their father's meaningless bequest provokes sibling rivalry, and there the plot frays into meta-theatre. The actors shoot cannonballs through the fourth wall, the production pirates its way onto the audience's ship, and the play begins to take water in a serious way.

Avast sees Artaud and Beckett - and their theatres of cruelty and the absurd - resurrected in a danse macabre. One character is stuck in a washing machine; another is a blind man in underpants; another remains silent before his gibbering monologue towards the end. There are grotesque constraints, physical and psychic anguish, and a stage clogged with futile oddments.

It's an alienating and occasionally comic performance but it's more visually successful than anything else. Director Thomas Henning needs, above all, to slow his actors down. At the moment, Avast is full of sound and fury. Lines are lost, some segments devolve into verbal diarrhoea, and it lacks the discernibly human patterns of speech and interaction that make Beckett so powerful.

Henning also needs to sort the good ideas from the theatrical masturbation. The play's Pirandello-like disintegration has the potential to work well, but does anyone outside drama class seriously contemplate juxtaposing Khachaturian's Sabre Dance and the Divinyls with a heart-rending rendition of Danny Boy?

Avast really puts the mental back into experimental theatre. Guaranteed to make you squirm, this is an invigorating show, hideously marred by immaturity.