Anthony Neilson has a surprisingly solid record as a writer of alternative Christmas shows. They are usually grotesque – but then, his plays usually are – and often seem more deliberately scripted than his usual devised-in-rehearsal-then-written-up method (although they may have emerged in exactly the same way). His latest ticks those boxes neatly, but its Christmassiness (Christmosity?) is almost entirely incidental; the events simply happen to be set around the festive season. Where it’s a little unusual for Neilson is that it springs from an identifiable source, although this is not an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story so much as inspired by it, or simply riffing on it.

The spine of the Poe tale remains intact: narrator, driven insane by housemate’s glittering eye, murders and dismembers said housemate, but the victim’s heart refuses to be still. Here, though, the two central characters are women: a playwright on retreat in an attic flat in Brighton and her landlady. Probably. Most of the time. Facts begin to shift: the investigating detective morphs between camp and ineffectual to flinty and inexorable... even his hairline changes, as do the accused’s name, from Celeste to Camille, and the lighting states: the tough guy always appears with house lights on. We begin to wonder whether one of these strands is Celeste (for the sake of argument)’s fiction, but which one, and how much of what we see is neither real nor fictional but her increasing delusion, or what? It’s a puzzle, in short.

As ever, Neilson leavens the action with pitch-black humour. On this occasion, though, there are also a plethora of conceptual puns which remain unspelt-out but simply lurk there. Landlady Nora sports a huge, bulbous eyeball like a boiled egg; Celeste also has an aversion to egg... or, in German, Ei. The first scene in Brighton shows (though discreetly) Celeste on the loo... or on the po/Poe. The sharp-eyed will also have spotted that, in an apparent prologue, the theatrical award which Celeste wins but refuses is heart-shaped. Compared to these arcane gags, matters like Celeste labouring under a deadline for the National Theatre or the detective offering a verdict on the current lauded West End production of Company (“Meh”) are chicken-feed.

Tamara Lawrance rides the increasingly surreal rollercoaster of events dextrously as Celeste, somehow committing to the moment yet also finding a through-line for her character(s). Imogen Doel’s always engaging acting talent seems undiminished by having half a ping-pong ball glued to her face, and certainly not affected by a little thing like Nora’s murder. David Carlyle is a little too mincing as one version of the detective but daunting as the other. Neilson the director enjoys making full use of the resources of his commissioning venues to realise Neilson the writer’s bizarre vision: here the supernatural and the psychedelic each come into play, and even someone as blithe about spoilers as I am would hesitate before revealing the most (not quite literally) eye-popping effect. If the show doesn’t seem to have any decipherable hinterland, at least the land itself affords an exhilarating hike.

Written for the Financial Times.