Stage Struck

Can rock and theatre get it on, asks PETER CRAWLEY

HOW HARD, exactly, can the theatre rock? The question occurred to me not long ago while watching two men swinging baseball bats at a rather blameless Fender Telecaster.

Suspended upright from the ceiling of the Barbican Theatre, the guitar rattled, grumbled and let out long, distorted sighs while Bryce and Aaron Dessner – the twin brother guitarists of The National – attacked it solemnly, like a joyless piñata. Somewhere in the din the answer to my question seemed to be, not very hard.

This was a show called The Long Count,a sort-of indie rock opera collaboration whose participants were unbearably promising. Beyond the Dessners, TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe and The Breeders' Kelley Deal each lent vocal performances, and the whole thing was enveloped by an orchestra and video projections.

The first person to arrive onstage, visual artist Matthew Ritchie, explained that the show was inspired by Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation myth. That was the precise moment my heart took a dip.

“It deals with twin brothers who play a ball game,” one of the Dessners explained in the programme. “So you think: Oh, look at the coincidence!”

Dear God. If you take the Mayan calendar literally, the world is coming to an end late this year. (Had you been watching some of your favourite musicians wearing awkward masks, making uncertain theatrical gestures, or clattering instruments on the basis of a coinkidink, you might have felt that December 21st couldn’t come soon enough.)

This just won't do. Theatre and rock ought to make beautiful music together, but from The Who's Tommyto any given Peter Gabriel concert, the results are wildly erratic.

Okay, there's a huge age difference between the forms, but there's also a genuine chemistry: rock is visceral, emotive and transgressive, where the theatre is spectacular, organising and meaningful. Put a director as astonishing as Robert Wilson together with a musician as raw as Tom Waits, and you get dark musical fables such as The Black Riderand Woyzeck.

Then again, put a director as stunning and imaginative as Julie Taymor together with half of U2 and you get Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. ("All sound and no sense," as one of the more charitable critics put it.)

Perhaps the answer is to be modest in your ambitions. Gob Squad recently handed several electric guitars to a number of dangerously under-qualified audience members in Revolution Now!and asked them to shred for change. And next week the Jon Fosse play Purpleopens in Project Arts Centre, where a group of teenagers fumble through an amateur band rehearsal as the story unfurls.

So long as they avoid baseball bats and creation myths, they should be fine.

Theatre about to rock, we salute you.