"The Blue Dragon". Burton Taylor Studio

Like Midnight Express, The Polar Express, and even the Orient Express (the Agatha Christie one I mean) The Blue Dragon is both a train and a metaphor*. And like all trains, it knows exactly where it’s going, even if its passengers haven’t a clue.

Oisin Byrne has crafted an incredibly assured piece of theatrical unreality, tight as a nut at just fifty minutes, and bursting with humour, self-referentiality, unexpected twists and turns, and – in the end – an overwhelming plume of emotional release, like an old locomotive letting off steam when it finally reaches its destination.

On the mysterious journey – the secrets of which it would be spoilerish to reveal – characters go round in circles, contradict each other and themselves, and repeat each other’s words without knowing why. The mini-plots cross over and under each other in an intricate pattern of theatrical architecture. If this was Hitchcock it would be called Strange On a Train. It’s like a Max Escher woodcut of impossible staircases that somehow make sense. As the last line is spoken, the final Escher lizard completes the puzzle, and miraculously everything fits. It’s a Russian doll of symbolism: the train is a metaphor for death, but death is a metaphor for completion, but completion is a metaphor for art, and art is a metaphor for life.

You might think, with all this complexity going on, The Blue Dragon might be a pretentious experience, but it’s completely the opposite. It’s down-to-earth and raucously funny. Every time it flirts with self-importance, it immediately undercuts itself. Of course this is largely down to Byrne’s button-bright script, but the actors are also in total control, and the entire enterprise positively bubbles with confidence and style. There’s also some gleefully macabre use of shadow puppets, and I’ll never hear David Tomlinson singing Bobbing Along On the Bottom of the Beautiful Briny Sea with the ears of innocence again. The image of Magritte’s Time Transfixed – a speeding train hurtling out of a fireplace – dominates the background, and Magritte’s very special brand of ‘realistic’ surrealism (that is, recognisable, realistically-rendered objects behaving in impossible ways) is a fitting image for the play. It’s the climax of Oxford’s theatrical year, and clearly the big guns have been rolled out.

From a staging perspective, I did find myself wishing that the characters didn’t have to sit or lie on the floor quite so much. When you’ve got an audience in front of you, it means no one apart from the front row can see what’s going on. But that’s easily fixed. And an online programme would be great. With a cast and crew as talented as this, I would have loved to mention names.

This production – like several of the best shows from the past year – is off to the Edinburgh Fringe over the summer. It’s exactly what Edinburgh needs, and a brilliant example of what Oxford students can create.

* Midnight Express = escape, Polar Express = belief, Orient Express = entrapment. Keep up.