An intriguing theatre double bill packed Smiths Alternative on opening night. The show opened with Tales of Ordinary Madness, devised and directed by Ernie Glass, but actor Julian Lamb and cellist David Pereira joining forces to present T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was certainly the main drawcard.

Performed by Cassie Brizzi, Tales of Ordinary Madness focuses on various types of insanity using a range of poetic material. Song lyrics jostle with poems, Michael Leunig keeps good company with the likes of Edward Bond, Dory Previn and David Bowie and for a moment Ophelia is there. The material could have used pruning and there was a need to find moments of silence, but Brizzi has intensity and some presence as she charts various forms of modern madness.

It is a suitable curtain-raiser, too, for Eliot's classic piece on 20th-century urban despair. Lamb and Pereira make a superb performance out of this poetry, using sparse performance imagery. Lamb works tightly in limited space and light and Pereira, with a reflective face like Peter Capaldi's in repose, sits to one side commenting warmly with his cello, now improvising, now quoting, but always listening.

The Waste Land has bedevilled its students for years with its complex references to myth, literature, history and ancient mythologies but some clarity arrives with this performance. That's chiefly because Lamb brings the characters of the piece to the fore. Humour and despair and feeling are accentuated as his Everyman figure slowly dresses in restricting suit and tie, pausing along the way to show the people of the city of a London between the two great wars. The woman in a loveless relationship, the gossips in a pub, the snatches of odd conversations all come to life, none perhaps more vividly than Madame Sosostris the fortune teller, with her "bad cold", broad accent and mysterious hints at a future she knows no more about than her clients do.

Lamb and Pereira bring to life glimpses of more ancient characters; Cleopatra (via Shakespeare), Tiresias the blind prophet, Elizabeth and Leicester on the Thames. You could talk all day about the subtext of this poem, but this performance gives it genuine immediacy and has the virtue of sending you back to look at the original. And overhanging it all is the image of Eliot's London, with its 1920s sordidness and limitations and its flashes of longed-for grandeur and meaning.

Always this is done with an assurance in performance and an awareness of stillness and control in both actor and musician that is lovely to look at and supports an incredibly complex text. Audiences who catch this show in Smiths Alternative's powerfully intimate space will indeed be fortunate. And the production of The Waste Land might very well remind people there is much more to Eliot than Cats.