"The Sun King". Burton Taylor Studio

In the hallowed halls of English literary analysis, allegory often gets a bad press.

‘This’ means ‘That’. ‘X’ means ‘Y’… Readers who yearn for a more nuanced, impressionistic view of life tend to turn their noses up at it. The Chronicles of Narnia are a perfect example. What could have been a flight of purest fantasy becomes a clunkily prosaic piece of doggerel as soon as you start realising that Aslan = Jesus and White Witch = Satan.

But children know the truth.

Children know that the secret of enjoying allegory is to forget or – better still – never to realize that it means something else; to enjoy the symbolism not for what it means but for what it is: a magical lion, a Green Knight, a corrupt pig. Symbolism can be beautiful and enticing, and once you stop worrying about what the symbols actually mean, you can truly appreciate their unreal beauty. That unreality is what The Sun King invites us to dive into.

Uğur Özcan’s long, meditative play has at its heart a child: a young boy called Jamie sitting on a beach, surrounded (appropriately enough) by C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Jamie is scrawny, nerdish and withdrawn. And he is visited by an allegorical figure: a shining, supernatural being, the Sun King, who has come to show him a different world, one in which he could be happy and liberated. But all is not as straightforward as it seems, and the King of Summerland gradually reveals depths of complexity that make both Jamie and the audience question the value of faith, utopia and heaven.

The Sun King moves at a steady, deliberate pace, and Özcan’s writing peels back its layers of revelation with great care and tenderness, so it would be brash and disrespectful to reveal anything of the plot here. But it is worth pointing out the skill with which the script develops: how little details dropped as chance remarks steadily grow into massive issues, like distant flashing lights ahead of you on the motorway gradually resolve into multi-car pile-ups the closer you get.

In the central role of Jamie, Matt Sheldon is alternately winsome and petulant, unsure of himself and determined to stand his ground. He has to grow from the age of 12 to 18 in the course of the play, and he succeeds in keeping the audience’s sympathy and fascination throughout. More than once I felt on the edge of tears at the sight of his innocent, outcast personality trying to find a way to exist in a hostile society. Opposite him, Jules Upson isn’t really shining as the Sun King. But he seems to be. His poise, focus, pacing and control make for a thrilling contrast with Jamie’s chest-shrunken awkwardness, and the ease with which he slips into portrayals of other family members shows an actor on top of his game.

The King visits Jamie on the same day every year, inviting comparisons with the truly awful Netflix show that everyone seems to adore at the moment, One Day. The difference is that, with One Day, every time they meet it’s all so facile and predictable you want to throw your cornflakes at the TV, whereas with The Sun King the annual rendezvous takes you somewhere new every time – not outrageously so; this isn’t a magic carpet trip; but gently, intelligently and, yes, allegorically. The King says at one point, ‘People think only by being forced to think’, and he seems to be expressing (albeit in worryingly dictatorial terms) what this play does to its audience.

The Sun King is never going to set the West End alight. It’s a play that knows its place and its audience, and they are right here in Oxford University. Sure, it could be half an hour shorter. But let it breathe. It’s a complex, philosophical discussion about despotism, repression and permissiveness, taking place largely in the mind of its central character. That may sound heavy and dull, but the power of this quiet, unassuming production is that it comes to us from a place of experience and suffering. Through allegory and emotion, Özcan gives us a taste of that suffering: it’s personal, painful and, most movingly, poetic.