The opening of Simon McBurney’s latest Complicité co-production was delayed for a week. This might not be unrelated to the presence of a TelePompTer bolted to the balustrade of the theatre’s balcony and clearly visible reflected in the massive video wall upstage. This is a wordy evening, and the words are taken at a gallop by the Anglo-American company of eight as they narrate and re-create episodes from the life of Jewish Harlem kid turned Hollywood actor turned Paramount supremo Robert Evans (the title is taken from Evans’ memoir).

And yet it’s just possible that the conspicuous autocue may be part of the whole complex of screen images in this stage production. Live video projections are thrown upstage, off to one side and even on to a fridge door; pre-recorded video backgrounds are projected to the side with actors on stage performing against them, then the combination is shot and shown upstage. Clips from Evans productions such as Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown jostle with actors onstage playing the other actors onscreen. It’s the kind of live multimedia torrent that characterises much of Complicité’s work, trying to round out and deepen stage presentations. And yet what is happening here is that everything is purposely tending towards the two dimensions of cinema.

It’s an often exhilarating kind of cubist rendering, but it has its limits. McBurney and co-adapter James Yeatman try to portray not just Evans’ life but that of America, sometimes too obliquely as when the account of Evans’ movie The Cotton Club intercuts with audio clips from Malcolm X and Gil Scott-Heron’s appositely titled 1980s state-of-the-nation rap “B Movie”. I suspect McBurney is aiming for an Eisensteinian kind of montage, but too often it comes out as a messier collage.

The company includes Heather Burns, Christian Camargo, Clint Dyer and Danny Huston; it’s all but impossible to tell who is playing who and when, but surely – surely! – Huston delivers the single line ascribed to his father John. Technical jiggery-pokery might be much in evidence, but this is driven by McBurney’s more recent fascination with the music of multi-layered speech. In the end you simply have to let it all wash over you, like Deborah Kerr in From Here To Eternity, or to shrug at the impenetrability and mutter, “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.”

Written for the Financial Times.