It is already dark when Mathilde Rosier’s cumbersomely titled Play for a Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty finally begins. The audience is ushered into this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, an undulating aluminium structure designed by Japanese architectural firm SANAA. Rosier is seated at a battered upright piano, her synthetic lace skirt adorned with life-sized cardboard poodles. Dogs aside, Rosier’s costume resembles that of someone who might work in a provincial shop selling healing crystals and incense, a look not dissimilar to that sported by PJ Harvey in her latest ‘White Chalk’ incarnation.

Rosier proceeds to play a sombre, almost funereal, tune on the piano, eventually accompanied by music from a concealed speaker, giving the rudimentary illusion of a second, invisible pair of hands on the keys. The performance goes on for some time, during which I find myself watching the flashing lights of passing planes advancing across the orange sky through the crack between temporary wall and pavilion roof. Attempting to justify this distraction to myself on my journey home I thought of Walter Benjamin’s description of boredom as: ‘a warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks’. If my feeling of boredom watching Rosier at the piano wasn’t induced by my own failing to engage with her work (which, I concede, it may well have been) maybe, I thought, it was a creative response unconsciously provoked by it. Or maybe not. Although SANAA’s Pavilion may resemble a cloud with a silver lining not every cloud has one: sometimes grey fabric is just grey. Indeed, the only surprise lining the Serpentine’s grey fabric blankets, invitingly displayed at the box office on what was a decidedly autumnal evening, was the price tag.

About half way through this first ‘act’ my companion turns to me and whispers archly: ‘Is this part the cruelty?’ It seems I am not the only one attempting to intellectualise my inability to sit still. The ‘cruelty’ of Rosier’s title aligns the work with that of the theatrical firebrand Antonin Artaud. More famous in theory than in practice, Artaud eschewed the tyranny of the text in bourgeois Western theatre in favour of a raw, gestural and primal ‘theatre of cruelty’. Although the prepositions and articles of Rosier’s unwieldy title are tricky to navigate, it seems the ‘stage’ referred to is temporal rather than spatial; a point in a developmental process rather than a theatrical platform. Rosier’s work can thus be understood as a response to the cruelty inherent in nature at this moment, rather than as theatre of cruelty in its own right. What is less clear is whether this natural cruelty is something to be celebrated, championed and performed (à la Artaud) or as something ominous and sinister to be resisted.

Following her performance at the piano, a large painting of butterflies in a landscape is laboriously carried centre stage by a couple of stage hands. The audience remains seated. We wait for some time. Anticipating some sort of performance, I do not look closely at the painting but cast my eyes over my fellow spectators. People begin to cough and look around distractedly. Eventually one of the stage hands whispers to an audience member that he is encouraged to explore the space. The audience member tentatively obliges and, Pied Piper-like, leads those around him to the ‘backstage’ area behind the painting.  I too rise and look behind the painting, where there stands, amid the crowd, a stack of brown cardboard boxes. Two of the boxes contain pieces of cardboard with birds painted on them. Some people in the audience take photographs of the birds with their phones. A young couple sit dejectedly on the piano stool holding hands.

The accompanying programme by Mareike Dittmer refers explicitly to the ambivalent position of the audience by espousing: ‘a play that teaches by being played not by being watched. A ceremony where the space for spectators merges with the stage and back stage and the position of the viewer is admittedly a rather fragile, precarious one’. Certainly, an air of uncertainty pervaded the evening. However, I am not convinced how liberating or instructive this ambiguity was for the audience, especially as any merging that did occur was not spontaneous but required prompting. Indeed, rather than those, like me, who happily obeyed the instruction to mingle and explore, I was struck more by the handful of people who resisted the impulse to look behind the screen, obstinately remaining seated, their refusal to participate in crossing the threshold from passive observer to active participant paradoxically becoming an assertion of subjectivity.

Eventually, people return to their seats and Rosier briefly re-emerges to suggest politely that people turn to face a screen on which the show’s final act, which consists of two short films, is projected. The first, Le massacre des animaux, involves a dream-like succession of pixilated images of woods, water and wind, occasionally intruded upon by a blurred or fragmentary human figure. These images are framed by the trees of Hyde Park providing a stark contrast: the materiality of the park trees giving an air of eerie artificiality to the apparently natural scenes on screen. The second film follows a small domestic cat wandering alone through a vast forest, a simple image which, for my money, was more eloquent than the rest of the show put together. Animals are commonly invoked as a symbol of the instinctual and primitive desires of the so-called natural world, but Rosier’s domestic cat is clearly not at home in the forest, while the poodles of the first act are an example of animal in its most artificial form: bred, fed and groomed by humans. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is cited in the show’s accompanying programme and this final film put me in mind of his acknowledgement that man in a state of nature: ‘no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist’.

Incidentally, when Rosier’s show was first staged at the Silberkuppe in Berlin it coincided with the opening of the major Jeff Koons exhibition Celebration at the Neue Nationalgalerie, a contrast many reviewers seemed to pick up on. Koons’ Popeye Series is currently on display in the main Serpentine Gallery. Arriving early, I took a moment to walk around the exhibition. I was initially struck by the marked contrast between the brash and lurid Koons and the whimsical sylvan world of Rosier. On reflection, however, I realise that the dichotomy I first perceived was rather superficial and that the distinction was not one of black and white, but of differing shades of grey. Rosier’s work may be preoccupied with nature, but it does not take place in some sort of ahistorical Romantic landscape, but acknowledges the impossibility of separating the natural from cultural. There were no poodles in the primordial wilderness.