It's a tall order, "to create the perfect aural, visual and spiritual experience". But this is the task that Theatre Cryptic have set themselves in collaboration with string collective Kuotet: to take music beyond the static concert performance and transform it into theatre. Two thirds of this extraordinary evening succeed in doing so.
The first two pieces of music, Steve Reich's Different Trains and Istvan Marta's Doom a Sigh, are profoundly transformed, melting into something between theatre, visual art and film, underpinned by the emotional pull of the music.
For the Reich piece, the speech fragments and train sounds it includes from the 1930s and 1940s are given a new backdrop: a projection of railway tracks, bridges and stations as seen from the front of a speeding train. With deadpan repetition, music that mimics speech, and the speeding footage, it is a giddy, queasy spectacle. This first piece, which powerfully revealed the historical context of Reich's work, rendered rhythmic repetition as meaningful as any narration of the horror that the past holds.
Marta's Doom a Sigh, based on Romanian folk songs, is given a very different interpretation. Before a blank projection screen, the quartet play an elegiac layering of sounds through a barrage of gunfire. This is moving enough - and then the words "my mummy" and "my daddy" appear on screen, followed by a black and white image of a couple. The gunfire continues, the couple disappear, and the musicians stare out at us. "Let everyone see what the life of orphans is like," appears on screen, and all we are left with is the sound of sobbing. That, and the fact that this could refer to so many conflicts, so many times.
The final part of the performance, which features a new transcription for strings of Allegri's Miserere, should work perfectly to soothe after such high emotion, and should also offer some resolution after what feels like a retrospective of 20th-century horrors. However, two things disrupt this. Though the quartet play superbly, as they do throughout, you notice the absence of the choral voice in the piece, and its resonance is something that no instrument can replace.
This isn't helped by the fact that, between the second and third pieces, there is a long set change, complete with a whirring dry-ice machine, and then, in the final section, a performer joins the musicians. I don't think we need this interpretative layer so late on and there is, sadly, something of the Kate Bush video to the choreography. What these late distractions do is remind you that you are sitting in a theatre, at a concert, trying hard to get beyond that. For the first 40 minutes, you forget this. That is an achievement worth seeing, hearing, and feeling.
Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0141-552 4267.
