Mephisto Waltz

A sense of impending death is in the air as we file into Assembly Roxy's main space, not just in the ticking clock, the atonal melodies that accompany it, or the stripped back curtains revealing swathes of gothic stonework in the church walls. There is also a shaven-headed man (Derevo founder Anton Adasinsky) in a tumbling black gown sitting in the second row, beckoning each passer-by to a seat with a bony curling finger.

Half-devil and half-Everyman, Adasinsky, who starts out in a frenzy of gnarled Satanic glee, is gradually pulled through an extravaganza of heaven and hell, with each new stage he passes through conjured up by a quartet of light-footed demons.

Devero knows how to touch every nerve, tease every morsel of macabre doom from a theatrical image and probe the subconscious for the things that disturb it most. After peeling away his black robe Adasinsky is smothered in a gruel-like substance that dries his skin to a stony pallor, made into a grotesque May Queen in a parade of flowers, bullied with tin-cans, crucified like a scarecrow and pelted with rotten tomatoes. A moment comes where he finds ecstasy in the ordeal, and his movement comes into its own, full of nuance, buffoonery and delirium as he stands, half a smashed watermelon on his head, some of the flesh dripping from his mouth.

All this may sound overblown—the heightened operatic style and stage that ends up covered in filth—but the images Mephisto Waltz leaves you with are both haunting in their originality and, at times, strangely beautiful.