Though best known for her acting work in the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla has also pursued a theatrical career for more than 30 years. Fassbinder casts a long shadow here too, since he and Schygulla were co-founders of the Antitheatre in Munich in 1968, and subsequently collaborated on numerous stage productions.

To kick off Scott Walker's Meltdown festival, Schygulla brought her one-woman show to the South Bank. It contained elements of cabaret and hints of French chanson, but had been conceived as a self-contained performance in character, rather than as a projection of a stage persona that one might imagine to be at least partly the performer's own. Schygulla, looking baleful in a grey silk dress, made no introductions and did not speak to the audience for the 90-minute duration of the show. Listeners were left to make of the material and her delivery of it whatever they might.

Schygulla lives in Paris and speaks French as naturally as she speaks German, and many of the songs - or recitations - were in the language of her adopted city. To give a leg up to the British, she had converted chunks of her material into English. There was extra food for thought for connoisseurs of the Schygulla-Fassbinder partnership, since the director also helped write some of Schygulla's material.

While Schygulla was often preoccupied with the themes of life's cruelty and the remorselessness of passing time and death, the musical glue was supplied by her pianist and arranger, Jean-Marie Senia. Where Schygulla's delivery remained inscrutable, Senia's accompaniment was a riot of styles and tonal colours. There were glimpses of ragtime and noisy splashes of music hall. Yet for all Senia's ingenuity, Schygulla's performance was more brain than heart.