“Intimacy is awesome”. Barker doesn’t use the word awesome in the American sense. Found In The Ground, his new play, made for his own production company, the Wrestling School, promises “urinating nurses, mechanical dogs, fornicating, headless women, burning books and Adolf Hitler”. It reads a bit like a press release for the Jim Rose Circus’s first show in Auschwitz and on one level the production does feel designed to shock at all costs. This can get tiresome. But the relentless barrage of nightmare images contains flashes of pithy, uncanny emotional honesty, which move this piece away from prurient Horrorcaust spectacular and towards a scream of consciousness at the terror of mortality and the terror of the responsibility of living. It is uncomfortable viewing precisely because the ideas it considers are big, painful and irresolvable.

A senile former Nuremberg judge is burning his priceless library and considering the men he sent to execution as he contemplates his own death. His daughter has an affair with his young librarian while also living out her compulsion to have sex with the dying. These and others are visited by a spirit of a philosophically-minded dead war criminal, are guarded and attacked by three Cerberus-like dogs and finally granted an audience with a Noel Coward-accented and disturbingly cogent Hitler. A topless young woman, head obscured, stalks unacknowledged through the action in high heels and a garter belt proclaiming that she is the representative of Anne Frank and all the Holocaust dead. It is openly absurd, but maybe considering the vaster questions, such as death of European culture and one’s own mortality, is best done through the absurd.

Of all of Barker’s recent work, this seems to match most closely his manifesto for a Theatre of Catastrophe, where audiences are forced to find their own way though a linked but not literally cogent series of images. Moments, statements and sounds have fleeting connections here but, more like an installation than a traditional play, it is up to the individual to formulate their own reality from a varied smorgasbord of experiences. It is alienating and maddening, in part because it is not the collective experience we might expect theatre to be – in fact, the process of watching it is deeply isolating. But because of that the brief flashes of connection or beauty are the more precious, the more fragile and the more unsettling. Intimacy is awesome indeed.

- Sarah Chew