Sometimes it all becomes a matter of squaring the circle: reconciling, or at least finding a workable compromise between, two mutually exclusive elements. (No, I’m not thinking at all of current British parliamentary events; why do you ask?)

Peter Strickland’s 2012 film Berberian Sound Studio is a horror picture in which the goriest, most terrifying thing that actually happens (or does it?) is an unexplained knock on the door. Everything else is perpetrated by, or more often simply suggested by, sound effects as protagonist Gilderoy mixes the soundtrack for an Italian horror/mystery/exploitation film. The first circle, then, to be squared by Joel Horwood and Tom Scutt’s stage version is to accommodate both the allusive, oblique approach of the film and theatre’s core characteristic of “liveness”, with us as audience sharing a time and space with people and events. Horwood’s script, in particular, needs to spell out enough to keep us plugged into the proceedings, yet also leave enough gaps for our imagination to take on most of the construction.

He does a fine job of it (and brings matters in at under the film’s 94-minute running time), until the final phase. Strickland’s film deconstructs itself and then reassembles in a different configuration which seems, bizarrely, to be a metaphor for itself. That remark makes no sense unless you actually see this happening, which is rather my point. The effects are so dependent on the nature of film, however, that Horwood has to ditch a good 90% of this material and replace it with a flashback which doesn’t really add anything except a moment for the final blackout. It’s both effective and brave, however, to leave almost as much of the dialogue in untranslated Italian as the film does.

Tom Scutt’s direction (hitherto he has been exclusively a designer) likewise gets as much as it can out of substantive events in the sound studio without overplaying its hand. Tom Brooke as Gilderoy begins as passive, perhaps paralysed by the unfamiliarity of the genre compared with his normal territory of nature documentaries; as work progresses, he finds his job of giving a voice to the various (unseen, of course) monstrosities begins to infect his own personality. Lara Rossi as voiceover actor Sylvia begins to suggest that there may be more going on than simply a tasteless film. One of the Foley artists providing sound effects by taking an axe to melons and the like is played by Tom Espiner, whose own Sound&Fury company has produced several works in which the principal element is aural.

But that’s where the second square circle comes in. Live Foley work is now fairly familiar in stage productions, and so a piece that does not just involve such work but is to a great extent about it seems an enticing proposition. What, then, when on a number of occasions Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design fakes it, with the folk onstage miming effects which are in fact recorded? You could argue, I suppose, that it just takes the reality/illusion theme one clever level deeper; I’m afraid, though, that to me it simply amounts to wimping out.

Written for the Financial Times.