"The Storyteller". Burton Taylor Studio

The Storyteller is more a work of philosophy than theatre: a meditation on the nature of eternity, and a Socratic dialogue between one who merely sees the future, and one who lives forever. The publicity says it’s Samuel Beckett meets Cormac McCarthy, and that’s a fair description. But does it make for a great play?

Patrick Painter’s strange and elusively compelling creation shows us what it feels like when you’ve outlived not just your family but the entire universe too, by presenting us with an eternal character called The Storyteller. She sits in icy resentment at the end of time, and pours out her ire on The Astrologer, a Loki-like imp who conferred immortality on her billions of years previously.

The Storyteller’s quandary is reminiscent of the travails of Neil Gaiman’s Endless. Lily Massey, in a great performance, sits in despair in a wasteland of clocks, musty books and forgotten machinery, reflecting on what it all meant, and how it can ever come to an end. There’s a feeling of HG Wells’ Time Machine (the book not the film) about the scenario – specifically the chapter where the Time Traveller takes his machine to the end of existence on Earth, as its rotation is dwindling to a standstill, and the last remaining evidence of life is a lone, flapping thing in a lake: an image of despair.

But Massey’s character is called Storyteller, not Survivor. She says she has accumulated stories across the aeons, like Marvel’s Watcher, or, as she puts it, ‘a passive observer of humanity.’ She even recounts one actual incident, about an encounter with a young lad. But it’s no story, merely another iteration of her soul-searching. Given the title of the show, one story would have been nice.

There is a single scene of ethereal beauty, where the Storyteller recounts the extremes she has seen and done. It’s like Rutger Hauer’s haunting speech at the end of Blade Runner: evocative, and glimpsing the eternal. And accompanying the otherworldly location and cerebral fireworks is a remarkable soundscape designed by Hayden Montfort. Breathing, ticking, bubbling up, the sound feels organic, and perfectly captures the atmosphere.

But all this doesn’t make a play. It makes a meditation.

On top of that, there is a particular problem here that we spend the first quarter of the show wondering who the characters are and exactly what they are talking about. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but when, as here, they know what’s going on and we don’t, it can get annoying not to be allowed in on the secret. I found myself wondering if it was going beyond intriguing and straying into the realm of taunting.

So Patrick Painter may well have created something amazing here. Like Robert Browning’s Paracelsus, it could best be described as a poem that resembles a play, rather than being a play itself. I’d love to read it. It’s words are like jewels, twinkling in a firmament now devoid of living stars. But it lacks one of the key requirements of words once they get up on stage: drama.