"The Man Who Turned Into A Stick". BT Studio

Before tonight I was only familiar with Kobo Abe from his extraordinary 1964 film Woman In The Dunes, a magical realist piece of new-wave independent cinema about a man voluntarily trapped in a pit. It hangs heavy with symbolism, but its strident, anti-commercial standpoint goes hand in hand with detailed, realistic settings and humane direction from Hiroshi Teshigahara, and it's a fascinating, disturbing experience. 

The three one-scene plays that comprise The Man Who Turned Into A Stick clearly come from the same pen. Driven by fervent, socialist idealism, they use surreal plots, absurd scripts and symbolic events to shake up the Japanese art world of the late 1950s. Above all, like Woman In The Dunes, they feature men trapped in impossible prisons. It's Kafka meets Beckett halfway up (or down) an Escher staircase.

In Part One, The Suitcase, two women debate the pros and cons of breaking into a large piece of luggage that contains a man who represents the ancestors of one of their husbands. Part Two, The Cliff of Time, gives us a man trapped in an endless boxing match. And in Part Three we meet the man who turns into, and is ultimately confined in, a stick.

Whether these episodes represent birth, life and death, the treatment of the proletariat by the ruling classes, or a novel approach to small-scale housing projects, doesn't really matter. What's important is that, when Abe wrote them, they were revolutionary. Now, seventy years later, they look both experimental and bizarrely out of date at the same time, as well as off-puttingly androcentric, like the tired 'tortured male genius' tropes of Abstract Expressionism, or the radical earnestness of a Jackson Pollock painting. We're more cynical now. My kid could do that.

Tomas Overton's production at the BT is an honest, devoted presentation of the text. But it is about as basic as you could possibly imagine. All the work has gone into getting the script on stage. There's no scenery (apart from the eponymous stick), very little costume, and hardly even any light. More importantly, there doesn't seem to be any attempt to find a way to make these playlets mean anything relevant to a modern audience.

Granted, it's perfectly acceptable to put on a play untarnished by reinterpretation, and let it speak for itself. Overton does that. But (according to Wikipedia) even when it was first staged it had brilliantly designed sets and animated performances. Here there is nothing but the actors and the words.

In places Overton's approach results in moments of surreal beauty. The man in the suitcase (I can't give you the actor's name - no programme) makes a statuesque figure of tortured, cramped flesh caught jarringly between the two chatting women. And Overton himself, as The Man From Hell in the final scene, holds a book ramrod-still before his eyes in a pose of disquietingly (and deliberately) meaningless precision.

But so much more is needed to make this show the modernist aesthetifest it demands to be. As if to prove this, Analogia Productions' Instagram is awash with photos from earlier productions that brought intense visual style to the source material: tiny men standing on vast bowler hats, demons in Cyclops visors, menacing shadows surrounding a lone working man: conformity confronted with the infinite. It looks amazing, and gives us a hint of what might have been. 

You sweeten the pill of symbolism by coating it with extravagant realism. In this production I'm afraid we only get the symbolism. And mankind cannot bear too much unreality.