That this one-woman show addressing the same topic does so in an equally cool, clinical way only adds to its potency. The use of rape as an instrument of terror and retribution in wartime is one of the monstrosities rarely mentioned in cold military histories.

The ruination and the fear is conjured primarily by the author, but is strikingly amplified by the lighting designer, Matt Cox and the composer, Russell Goldsmith.A Woman in Berlin is succinct - overly so, perhaps - but a persuasive portrait emerges nevertheless, thanks to the clarity (and gallows humour) of the raw material and Penman's intelligent, judiciously emotional performance. She is a figure from the past but very much in - and speaking of - the present. The woman, played by Penman, is dressed in period clothing but occupies a chic contemporary museum/war memorial space (designed by Gabrielle Logan). Janice Muller and Meredith Penman's stage adaptation compresses the account into a taut, 60-minute monologue. Meanwhile, the other women on her block are doing whatever it takes to survive. ''Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth.'' ''A stranger's hands expertly pulling apart my jaw,'' she writes. This way, she hopes, she will be protected from the predations of the lower ranks. Repeatedly attacked by the ''Ivans'', the diarist, a journalist who speaks some Russian, decides, in the interests of self-preservation, to secure the favours of an officer, ''a lone wolf''. Her account is unsentimental and unsparing. During reconstruction few were ready to acknowledge what had happened when the Red Army punched its way through the last of the German lines and into the capital: the rape of more than 100,000 women. Published anonymously in the 1950s, its frankness appalled German readers, and the book quickly went out of print. EINE FRAU IN BERLIN is the diary of a woman, 34, who records in unstinting detail her experience of the fall of Berlin in April 1945.

Marta hillers a woman in berlin