He was 13 Wilson recalls and he wrote a piece that went: `This

“He was 13,” Wilson recalls, “and he wrote a piece that went: `This is this and this is his and this is his and this is this and this is his and this is Chris and Chris is this is this is this is this is his is this is this is this is CHRIS.’” In this playing around with language as a kind of puzzle – rearranging its pieces into patterns of repetition and minute variation that inch the meaning forward and recreate the familiar from a slowed-down, alienated perspective – there are obvious affinities with what Stein achieved through art.Turning the text of Saints and Singing into theatre poses special problems, however: “There’s no situation to play and there are no characters.” There’s just the distinctive music of that strange hypnotic instrument, the Gertrude Steinway. It was this text’s near-total abstract quality (the word “abstract” is a mantra in Wilson’s conversation) that recommended it to the director as a piece to use as the basis for a workshop with students at Berlin’s Ernst Busch school, where the teaching is heavily psychology based. They perform the finished product with a stunning, zestful professionalism.As Londoners can now see in La Maladie de la Mort, (a 1995 Wilson production brought over as part of the French season and ending its brief run tonight), Marguerite Duras’s work also lends itself beautifully to Wilson’s abstract approach. The play is a static lyrical contention between a sick-of-soul elderly man (Michel Piccoli) and the woman whose paid-for body he can penetrate but who is, in every other sense, impenetrable to him. Set in a mental landscape, the duo often silhouettes against Wilson’s characteristic, brilliantly illuminated horizontal screen, the piece unfolds as a series of taut tableaux.

Like a piece of mobile statuary, the bonily elegant Lucinda Childs mesmerically drifts across the stage, twisting her body into various postures of reproving unattainability.It’s the droll bizarreries of Stein, though, that release the best in Wilson’s imagination. With a parrot as its mascot, the piece plays hilarious games with the idea of repetition and disposal. The same sequence of dotty physical “Consequences” punctuates the proceedings, each time with some cheeky variation (we see it from the back view, say, or in the climactic number, the whole thing is redone with the cast blissfully transformed into hunkered-down, effortfully leaping frogs). Wilson will blackout a scene, clear the stage, then coolly resume it in mid-sentence. Now sounding as Poulenc might if rescored for a synthesised steel band, now pastiching American pop genres with much interplay of trombone and clarinet, Hans- Peter Kuhn’s music performs the tricky feat of throwing Stein’s rhythms into relief through its own syncopated counterpoint.Wilson’s works in progress include a movie called Monsters of Grace with Philip Glass where, in reaction to a medium that’s in thrall to the close- up “things are very, very far away. In the first scene, the people are just microscopic” and the revival in New York of Time Rocker, a musical with Lou Reed about time travel.In the course of our conversation, what illuminated his art most for me was not the diagram he (left-handedly) drew in my notepad which showed how the scenes in Saints and Singing are structured on a recurring plan of portrait, still life and landscape. No, Robert Wilson was revealed better in a long, slow, superbly timed and structured anecdote that is like inspired self-parody.

It involves Wilson reporting how, all over the world, he has had to badger friends and collaborators into being honest with him about whether they think a particular piece works. Each time, he manages to extract the reluctantly honest answer, “You know, Bob, it’s a little slow.”Then, in the punch line paragraph, he invites his sister, whom he hasn’t seen for 25 years, over to New York to see a show She doesn’t share the inhibitions of the others “So I said, `Oh, tell me, Suzanne. If you didn’t know that your brother had written, directed and designed this play, would you know it was my work?’ She said (cue broad Texan accent), `Sure’. I said, `How would you know?’ She said, `Because it’s so slow!!!’.”. Romeo and Juliet

RSC, The Pit
For once, Shakespeare’s lovers are not so much star-cross’d as sun-kiss’d.

The RSC’s new production of may open with a rent-a-cliche funeral scene – all gloomy clarinets and vast black umbrellas – but from there on in, the designer Robert Jones creates a wonderfully warm atmosphere, an even greater achievement in the Barbican’s Pit, a space usually more claustrophobic than intimate.For the formal moments, Jones uses dusky linens and soft-coloured, four- button suits, but for the most part these people are in work clothes showing them as earthy Italians. Rather than suggesting rivalry based on wealth and position, he and the director Michael Attenborough place the characters closer to peasant stock than traditional nobility.The cast take to the idea with relish. Swaggering around what appears to be the town square, they all look like they’re auditioning for a remake of Bertolucci’s 1900. Attenborough is at pains to point out the youthful physicality at the play’s heart and uses the heat of the Verona sun to bring out sweat and sexuality. That in turn emphasises the macho violence which shimmers like a heat haze above the characters.If the whole production were as good as the design, they’d be on to a winner but, on several counts, it fails to deliver on its promise.