Shock of the new

Shock of the new

In a cluttered old warehouse adjoining the Three Mills Studio complex in London's East End – just around the corner from that latter-day theatre of cruelty the Big Brother house – the cast and crew are rehearsing for another season of the popular "junk opera" Shockheaded Peter. In its original incarnation, the cautionary tales that made up Heinrich Hoffmann's classic Struwwelpeter were adapted by Martyn Jacques and performed by his trio, the Tiger Lillies, with suitably grisly gusto, Jacques's distinctive pantomime falsetto (imagine Dame Edna arranged by Tom Waits) furnishing the appropriate mood of nightmarish dread to accompany such ghoulish pieces as "The Dreadful Story about Harriet and the Matches", "Bully Boys" and the ominous "Snip Snip (Suck-a-Thumb)".

Shock of the new

In a cluttered old warehouse adjoining the Three Mills Studio complex in London's East End – just around the corner from that latter-day theatre of cruelty the Big Brother house – the cast and crew are rehearsing for another season of the popular "junk opera" Shockheaded Peter. In its original incarnation, the cautionary tales that made up Heinrich Hoffmann's classic Struwwelpeter were adapted by Martyn Jacques and performed by his trio, the Tiger Lillies, with suitably grisly gusto, Jacques's distinctive pantomime falsetto (imagine Dame Edna arranged by Tom Waits) furnishing the appropriate mood of nightmarish dread to accompany such ghoulish pieces as "The Dreadful Story about Harriet and the Matches", "Bully Boys" and the ominous "Snip Snip (Suck-a-Thumb)".

Most, it seemed, concluded with him celebrating the errant child's demise with unseemly relish, shrieking: "Dead! Dead!" loud enough to wake the, er, dead. But for the show's new run, Jacques has been replaced by the imposing presence of the former Pere Ubu front man, David Thomas – a singer with, if anything, an even weirder vocal manner than Jacques.

Crocus Behemoth, the stage name Thomas assumed through Ubu's early years, aptly conveys something of the absurd shock of hearing his extraordinary singing voice – part falsetto whine, part croak – emanating from his massive bulk. Simultaneously serious, sardonic and scared, it's the sound of a sinister cartoon, as if an elephant were occupied by a mouse, and its unique capacity to bring mirth to menace, and menace to mirth, seems tailor-made for Shockheaded Peter.

The stage set, a proliferation of portals flanking a central corridor with an exaggerated perspective and a vertiginously steep rake, is entirely suspended within the warehouse. At the front of the stage, Thomas perches nursing his melodeon (a diatonic squeezebox: as with a harmonica, you get a different note depending on whether you're sucking or blowing), while behind him his group, Two Pale Boys, attend to their instruments.

In contrast to the show's quasi-Victorian presentation, their arrangements make extensive use of modern Midi technology. Marginally the paler of the two boys, the guitarist Keith Moliné is able to generate up to four instrumental parts simultaneously from the one guitar, with different strings and chord shapes assigned to produce bass, synthesiser or guitar sounds. Slightly farther upstage, the horn player Andy Diagram uses a similar set-up to generate two separate parts, employing delay units and echo machines to create loops, over which he adds further real-time parts.

It all seems rather complex and technical, so it's no surprise, as I arrive, to find the assembled company wrestling with that most technologically advanced of instruments, the spoons. Somebody – maybe Thomas; maybe one of the show's directors, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch – has decided that what the song "Fidgety Phil" really needs, to animate its sad tale of a shuffle-bottomed child killed by a cascade of knives and forks, is the furious click-clacking of cutlery.

Crouch proves a dab hand with the spoons, but Diagram, who holds down most of the show's percussive duties, is less adept; eventually, one of the actors is assigned the task, and a run-through is attempted. Thomas's keening voice intones the grisly tale, and at the point when the doomed child wriggles off his chair and pulls the tablecloth on top of him, a garland of rusty metal pipes, pans and hardware drops down for Diagram to batter away at. As Thomas sketches the sad scene – "There's a blood-stained tablecloth lying on him/ There's knives and forks; they're all stuck in him" – the actor appears from a door stage left, opens a small case, takes out the spoons and rattles them against his legs, before replacing them in the case and returning through the door. He doesn't have the rhythm quite right yet, but the ensuing laughter and applause affirms the idea's value. Another moment of theatrical magic nailed down, the company breaks for lunch.

Over a plate of curry, helped down with liberally buttered bread rolls, Thomas explains what attracted him to the project when he was first sounded out about it last September. "When people ask me to do something and they pay me well enough, I generally say yes," he says, with sly candour. "It's a pretty easy decision, because people who know what I do usually don't ask me to do things that wouldn't be appropriate. And on another level, because I've already done my own 'junk opera', Mirror Man, I was interested to see how professionals approached the same kinds of problems I had."

He deliberately avoided seeing the previous presentation, so as not to be too influenced by the Tiger Lillies' approach. "They gave me videotapes and things, but I didn't watch them," he admits, "because Martyn Jacques has a very distinctive delivery, and I didn't want to get confused or prejudiced by it.

"Clearly, I was in the running, because in my own way, I have as unique an approach as he does. And if you're thinking of replacing the Tiger Lillies, you can't just replace them with 99.9 per cent of the groups that would be available. You need something with its own unique voice and strong personality, and people who can improvise and take things as they come. Because it is extremely loose – every day, there's changes in rehearsal; speeches vary; there's different slants put on things. It's very alive in that way, very interesting. Far more like a musical group than I would have imagined."

Although he has lived in Britain for a substantial part of the past few decades, Thomas's native background is the decaying industrial landscape of Cleveland, Ohio, where in the Seventies he founded the avant-rock band Pere Ubu, long acknowledged as seminal progenitors of punk spirit and new-wave noise. Hardly the best background, one might have thought, for grappling with the distinctly European sensibility underpinning Shockheaded Peter, though Thomas doesn't regard it as much of a problem.

"The nature of the tales is, I think, universal," he says. "Even though the Hoffmann tales are Germanic, you have the same sort of tales in America and other places: that 19th-century thing is not in and of itself European, though clearly it's set in a sort of Victorian English world. The way the Tiger Lillies were doing it was probably more European-oriented than English-oriented; I think this has moved the focus westward, so that it's Anglo-American rather than Anglo-European."

Likewise, his lack of familiarity with the great British pantomime and end-of-the-pier music-hall traditions in which the show is partly rooted has caused Thomas no qualms. "I see it far more as an Edward Gorey thing, or a Charles Addams thing," he explains. "To me, it's more like The Addams Family than a seaside thing; that's the resonance I have. The stories certainly aren't light and frothy – they're sort of dark. The children all die! But that's the way things used to be in stories such as Hansel and Gretel, with somebody getting burnt in the oven. I'm old enough that when I was a child I was still getting the same stories they would tell in the 19th century. It's only recently that children's stories have been rewritten – and I'm sure the great rise in juvenile delinquency has no connection with the fact that children's stories have been rewritten to make them more touchy-feely. Unrelated, I'm sure!"

The differences between doing this show and touring with a band, he claims, are mainly mechanical – things such as remembering to be in the right place at the right time – though the scenes played from the upstairs windows can be a little hairy for a man of Thomas's considerable stature, even when he is safely strapped into a harness. But he's looking forward to the 11-week run: "It's like being on tour, but not as hard," he reckons, "because we do 11 songs in the course of 90 minutes, which is a lot easier than doing a concert of the same length, because in a concert you're singing all the time, whereas here there's actors and other stuff, and it's a lot less stressful."

He seems to be enjoying himself. Perhaps, I suggest, it may awaken hitherto dormant thespian urges in him. Are we likely to see him taking up acting in future?

"No, no, no, I don't..." he splutters, amused, as he stirs a pat of butter into his Mars Bar Custard. "But then again, nobody's ever paid me to do it! I hate to sound mercenary, because I'm not. I only do music because somebody pays me – otherwise I could just stay home and sing in the bathtub and not have to deal with all the nonsense. But clearly, if I were only doing it for the money, I've made a really bad hash of it for 30 years!"

'Shockheaded Peter', Albery Theatre, London WC2, to 16 June (020-7369-1740)

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