By Rupert Christiansen [The Telegraph, 7 September 2009]
The curtain rises on Actus Tragicus to show a stage filled with the cross-section of a modern tenement block. Slowly its 20 rooms fill with about 50 ordinary people engaged in a spectrum of human activities, from ironing and dressing to making love and contemplating suicide. Death is at hand: a black-suited figure prowls silently, and the naked body of the unresurrected Christ lies in the cellar.