Well, this one lends a whole new meaning to the term “critic-proof”. I could spend day and night training a pneumatic drill on Martin McDonagh’s 80-minute play and still not be sure I’d hit any vein of reliable meaning. It’s often about creativity and its links to the shadows, sometimes more broadly about human nature itself, periodically about race and the still largely ignored massacres by the Belgians in the then-Congo Free State in the latter 19^th century. The title may even allude to the mysterious invisible stuff that apparently constitutes some 90% of the universe. But the actual events portrayed... Oh, I can see there’s no putting it off any further. Right, here goes...

Hans Christian Andersen (Jim Broadbent) luxuriates in his status as a master storyteller, but in fact derives all his material from a Congolese pygmy woman whom he keeps imprisoned in a glass-fronted box in his attic. This woman yearns to be reunited with her twin sister, who is likewise the source for Charles Dickens (whom Andersen keeps calling Darwin), but is also being pursued by a couple of scarlet-skinned, murderous and half-ghostly Belgians. The attic is hung with puppets. Expletives are most decidedly not deleted. A voiceover narration has been recorded by Tom Waits: when he is the voice of reason, you know you’re not in Kansas any more.

No, don’t call the men in white coats yet. Somehow this pinball-cannoning, psycho jamboree holds together and makes an impressive impact. McDonagh is now better known for his films such as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (which some claimed had problems of its own with the race dimension) than for plays like The Lieutenant Of Inishmore (revived in the West End earlier this year); yet although his work in the two media differs radically in terms of discipline and restraint, what they have in common are compelling chains of events. McDonagh likes stories. His most sui generis work (until this), the play The Pillowman, is about stories as psychological and political weapons. …Dark Matter marries this extravagant fascination with the equally ostentatious transgression of his other plays and washes the combination down with a jug of heavily spiked Kool-Aid.

Jim Broadbent (who appeared in the 2003 production of The Pillowman at Bridge supremo Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre) has an ever more dignified reputation, but has plainly been missing the chance to cut this loose. Likewise Phil Daniels, whose language is at its saltiest in years as, of all people, Dickens. Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles as the literally dark fount of stories Marjory may nominally be a captive but proves herself the most in-control and least fabulistic of the principal characters. Director Matthew Dunster has been increasingly drawn to the wild side of late, and here he gets to throw all decorum to the winds yet without closing his attentive eye. Anna Fleischle’s design likewise capers about on its free rein. It’s a magnificent wild card of a show, at once gaudy yet umbrous, and possibly McDonagh’s most magnetic work this century.

Written for the Financial Times.