Director-performer Julian Lamb and cellist David Pereira have combined their talents to bring to life one of the major works of 20th-century literature, T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land.

Lamb – a former Canberran who studied English literature at the Australian National University before going on to complete a doctorate on Renaissance poetics at Cambridge – first conceived of performing Eliot's poem more than a decade ago. He first presented it in 2001 and 2002, performing it with a soprano and a string quartet at Narrabundah College.

"It started in Canberra."

The piece is dedicated to Odette Upstill, who died in France in 2008 at the age of 24. She was the first violinist when it was first performed.

On a recent visit to Canberra, local politician Steven Bailey introduced Lamb to veteran cellist David Pereira, leading to the idea for an even more intimate presentation: Lamb reciting The Waste Land and Pereira accompanying with music by Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Mahler and Wagner as well as improvisations of his own.

Lamb says, "What we've done is used the music to draw out the emotional nuances of different fragments of the poem."

And fragmented the poem certainly is, he says, with different voices heard throughout.

"Each of the fragments gives you a sense of a life. The voices are in various ways suffering and seeking some kind of redemption."

But although the poem – first published in 1922 and written in the wake of World War I and the poet's own mental and marital problems – is Eliot's view of "the world as a broken place in need of redemption", there are moments of hope, too.

Lamb recites the poem from memory with the text closely aligned to the musical accompaniment.

"David and I wanted to collaborate closely and we thought we would do that together, just the two of us."

Lamb says he is omitting the poem's epigraph, written in Latin and Greek, but is including sections of the work written in French, German and Sanskrit, with translations in the program. He and Pereira first performed their version of The Waste Land in Bright recently and Lamb says it was very well-received.

Lamb is on leave from the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he lectures in English and is also artistic director of an emerging theatre company, Shadow Players. He says news of the performances with Pereira has attracted a lot of interest in Hong Kong and he hopes the cellist will come over to perform The Waste Land with him there in 2015.

Also on the program is Tales of Ordinary Madness: A Play, directed and devised by Ernie Glass with musical assistance by Rudi Katterl. Performed by Cassie Brizzi, it's a collage on the themes of eccentricity, perceived insanity, and entrapment. It adapts and integrates songs, poetry and script by artists such as Steve J. Spears, Adrian Mitchell, Edward Bond, Ken Kesey, Michael Leunig, Paul Simon, David Bowie and Dory Previn.