Most performers try to avoid dying a death on stage: performance artist Marina Abramović approached director Robert Wilson with a request that he produce hers.

has been making an exhibition of herself for almost 40 years, though her notoriety reached new levels last year with the 700-hour silent performance The Artist Is Present, for which people queued overnight for a one-to-one encounter with the artist in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art.

Abramović has stated quite bluntly that "to be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre", which makes a practically static, three-hour theatrical exploration of her self-hatred seem a taxing project; though the success of the show, presented by the Manchester international festival, has less to do with Abramović's depthless self-obsession than with the calibre of her collaborators.

Wilson directs a slow procession of stark, funereal stage pictures peopled by nine mini-Marinas and a pack of prowling doberman dogs, with narration provided by Willem Dafoe in an orange mullet and heavy pan-stick makeup that puts you in mind of Batman's the Joker MC-ing a Berlin cabaret. But it's the music that binds everything together, with the chilling ululation of traditional Serbian singer Svetlana Spaji´c merging into fragile songs written and performed by Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons.

There are moments that will stay with you forever; others that simply seem to take that long. As always, the question with Abramović's projects has to be: "Why?" And, as ever, the answer seems to be: "Because ..."