"To be desired," writes John Berger, "is perhaps the closest anybody can reach in this life to feeling immortal." He writes, "lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there's skin behind it." He speaks of "the flavour of pleasure itself."

These thoughts appear in Berger's "The Museum of Desire," a terse, enigmatic story, perhaps more exactly an essay, set in a museum based on London's Wallace Collection. The typescript is recent, unpublished and totals just five pages, some 2,587 careful words. Who would imagine it turned into a play?

The answer is Dan Jemmett, the 40-ish Englishman has already created two works for Quantum Theatre. In consort with his company of actors he calls 404 Strand, Jemmett has taken the "Museum of Desire" text as the basis for an evening of devised theater.

Together with a string quartet, the additional fillip of Berger's small story/essay "Flowers in a Corner" and the unusual spaces (standard with Quantum) of the Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze, the resulting "Museum of Desire" makes its world premiere tonight.

Berger is best-known for his Booker Prize-winning novel "G" and his book on art theory (and a resulting BBC-TV series), "Ways of Seeing." An artistic and intellectual force at 82, the polymath English novelist, artist and art critic lives in Haute Savoie, France, near the Swiss border.

Jemmett also has made much of his artistic life in France, directing largely in Paris, most recently as the rare foreigner to work for the Comedie Francaise.

That connection began when Jemmett was directing "Shake," a version of "Twelfth Night, or What You Will" (the subtitle justifying Jemmett's pun on William Shakespeare), with a set featuring five beach huts. A great success, it toured France.

One of Jemmett's actors, a Spaniard, had been in Theatre de Complicite's 1992 "Street of Crocodiles" and through that had met Berger. When the play arrived in Laussane, near Berger's home, the actor invited him to come see it.

Berger and Jemmett hit it off and the writer invited the director to visit him at his home in the mountains. "He's an extraordinary person," Jemmett says, describing a vigorous, independent guru of arts and letters. "I fell in love with him, I suppose."

Berger gave him a copy of his unpublished story. "It's very hermetic," Jemmett says with understatement. "It's beautiful, but it doesn't give away its secrets." Though he couldn't imagine how it might be turned into theater, it lodged in his mind.

Flash forward a bit and Jemmett devised "In Veronese's Larder," a Berger-like piece for a festival in Parma, Italy. It sent him back to "Museum of Desire," convinced that "I'd been given a charge, a mission."

So he arranged a sort of tryout in a suburb of Paris, enlisting an Italian choreographer/dancer to create and perform a two-person adaptation. ("I hadn't performed in 10 years," Jemmett says. "I was dancing on my knees.")

Although the dance people and the theater people who saw it were both bemused at something straddling the two worlds, Berger saw it and was enthusiastic. But Jemmett knew that it needed to be staged in a gallery, or even better, a museum, or best of all, one with Renaissance and 18th-century art.

Cue Quantum and Karla Boos. "Karla can make things happen in this city that you can't get anywhere else on earth," Jemmett says. "She has such insistence and [anatomical detail here] -- nothing fazes her!"

He knows this from experience, having previously asked her to provide him with a steel mill for "Dogface" and a movie theater for "Billy the Kid." "She's sort of like a fairy godmother," he says, "with insane energy and strength."

Most remarkable, perhaps, is that she uses her powers to support the work of other directors, not just shows she directs herself. "If I had [my own company]," Jemmett says, "I'd hoard it. She shares it."

This time, as if to challenge her, he asked Boos for a live string quintet and an art gallery. She pulled it off, securing musicians from Carnegie Mellon and then the Frick, which can plausibly stand in for London's Wallace Collection, with a real Fragonard and a portrait of Louis XV's queen. ("You look at his wife and you understand why he had a mistress," says Jemmett.)

Jemmett is used to working in big cities -- London, Paris -- but he finds a flexibility in Pittsburgh. He calls working here "stepping into the margins a little bit -- not a bad thing to do."

With one exception, the actors are those Jemmett has worked with in his two previous Quantum shows, including Canadian actor John Jay.

Working with the Frick has had its complexity, moving from "the exuberance of the rehearsal room" to a museum with stringent rules, necessitated by the monarch's ransom worth of art on the walls. Lights, costumes, sound and the relationship with the audience -- all "the artificial magic" -- is necessarily limited. A museum conserves; a theater company creates.

But the very limitations force creativity. And "what they've given us is the real thing": objects that eerily match the story. In addition, Berger has sent three small sketches of his own, which the Frick has framed and hung.

The nightly schedule is unusual. The 7 p.m. audience, after seeing the play in the museum's 18th-century room, joins the newly arrived 8 p.m. audience in the rotunda for a pause involving European candies (if they clear customs). Then both groups hear the quintet play Shubert's "Trout" (it also figures in the play, on a cheap tape machine) and Jemmett read "Flowers in a Corner." Then the second group sees the play. So it will be a different experience for the two groups.

"A completely unusual evening," Quantum calls it.

The Cafe at the Frick offers dinner reservations beginning at 5 p.m.; call 412-371-0600.