The Yard is back.

After a year of renovation, Hackney Wick’s fortress of subversive theatre has re-opened.

And though the DIY architecture of its previous design has been replaced by something more polished, its bold, innovative approach to theatre continues right where it left off with ‘Philosophy of the World’, an absurd, anarchic, punk-rock play that is itself a testament to breaking things and starting again.

People should know exactly what they are in for.

On the face of it, this is a ‘biopic’ about the Shaggs, a divisive, rock group from the 1960s, whose album ‘Philosophy of the World’ was revered by Kurt Cobain and Frank Zappa (who labelled them the ‘godmothers of punk’), but lambasted by others for its atonal, unstructured sound. One Rolling Stone critic famously described it as a ‘stunningly awful wonderful record’.

But the audience should not be fooled when they are told in the on-stage introduction that this will be a ‘narrative’ and a ‘linear’ play.

There may be a three act structure, there may be biopic exposition – a small town setting in New Hampshire, a group of sisters urged into a band with no musical training by an authoritarian father (who believed they were fated to be famous from a palm reading) - but by the time we reach the second act, entitled ‘Free Will’, the play descends into chaos.

Cracks in the fourth wall had been made in the first act: audience members were given names and personas of the townsfolk, were encouraged to boo in the scenes when the Shaggs were booed in their first gigs, and the actors responded spontaneously as the story of their fate was dictated step by step by the projector.

The actor, Nigel Barrett, who plays the father, also plays the stage manager. Now, the actors playing the three sisters have abandoned their roles completely.

They spray and chug cans of coke, they run up and down the stage to play with the audience and the stage lighting, they fight brutally with their stage manager (and father) – before they tear down the fourth wall completely when an actor goads an audience member into removing their shirts together.

It’s fun, comic, and for any introverts in the seats, completely unnerving.

The architects of this anarchy are Dora Lynn, Kat Cory and Nora Alexander, the writers, creators and performers who form the award-winning experimental theatre company ‘In Bed with my Brother’.

And their choice of subject here is an inspired one, owing to the distinctive parallels between the two trios. Like the Shaggs, they are women devoted to an erratic, subversive art.

They are devoted to the punk-rock motive of questioning and dismantling the restrictive
systems around them, whether that be the patriarchy or the theatre itself. They are even linked uncannily by place names: ‘We identified so much it was our right.’

In the final act, ‘Philosophy’, these elements come together in a great crescendo from the trio. All are now shirtless.

One is chalking a diagram on a giant blackboard, one is playing a freewheeling drum solo, and another reads out a mind-bending, rapid, furious philosophy that involves a history of Andy Warhol and feminist writer Valerie Solanas, a tirade against corruptions of power in our own time, against social media, and modern politicians.

It is a mesmerising moment – the content could be adapted in any era, but it is a climax to a disruptive play which feels particularly powerful in our own unsettling times. The safety of the theatre has been successfully dismantled.

That said, even chaos can have false notes. There is a discussion of fathers with the stage manager in the second act where the pathos doesn’t quite land, and the idea of being trapped in the theatre could have been given more room.

As with any avant-garde art form, people will either receive ‘Philosophy of the World’ openly or not.

I suspect this trio, much like their historic counterparts, will not care in the slightest: as they say to the audience in the final lines, before being killed off one by one by their stage manager: ‘Why are you here? Did you expect this to be good?’