The act of remembering can be overwhelming, often not so much done by us as to us; triggered by a chance glimpse, the seemingly familiar. In Joyce’s novella, published as part of Dubliners, memory conveys potency, the remembered figure of a dead ex-lover holding a power over the present that those simply existing within it can’t hope to compete with. This sense of overwhelm is at the heart of Città di Ebla’s powerfully visual production, expressed through large-scale, hyper-real imagery on a large downstage screen though which all the live action is viewed, and in the unsettlingly warped and electronically styled everyday sounds that rise to unnerving crescendos. Also by some startling theatrical moments (which I won’t spoil here) that vividly articulate the feeling that memory hovers at the margins of your senses, ready to ambush you.

Italian company Città di Ebla are interested in working from literary form, having previously devised from Kafka’s Metamorphoses. As the lights dim, the opening image seems to transform the dominant screen into the texture of paper, from which, slowly, images of a half-seen female form coalesce, like photos developing or ideas slowly forming themselves through Joyce’s layered prose. The sound of miserly rain falls on every side. We could almost be in Dublin. From here on in though, the relationship with the source material becomes rather more relaxed: theme and form seem of most interest to the company. Photography – taken live on stage by company founder Claudio Angelini, with selected images projected almost immediately to the screen – is the central metaphor, and it’s an eminently thoughtful dramaturgical choice, literally foregrounding a sense of the present’s messy fleetingness compared to posterity’s clearly drawn lines. The large scale, close-up images that blossom as our protagonist (company founder Valentina Bravetti) explores a deserted room effectively capture the sense of powerful snapshots of memory arising. However, their connection to the action isn’t sufficiently clear in the first half of the piece to capitalise on this clever mechanism. Despite the programme’s protestations to the contrary, the scene of apparently frenetic action played out to us only through photographs sent out from ‘backstage’ does come across like a slideshow, and it’s hard to hold on to a sense of the live event occurring on the other side of the blacked out screen. Also, it’s an odd experience to watch a live performance where the still images are more compelling, and deliberately so, than the moving body on stage.

As the story unfolds, we slip between past and present to illustrate the haunting power exerted by memories of the dead young man. From behind the screen we witness hauntingly intimate images from our protagonist’s memory, but strangely, it’s her who is being remembered. The relentless focus on Bravetti as subject, in various states of undress – writhing on a bed, even stripping for the camera – feels unjustified. Even when the stage pictures created by the meeting of gauzy live action, light, and projected image are ravishingly beautiful, the focus slides away from the power of remembering into a sort of imagistic homage to the rememberer and her physical form. Perhaps we are meant to be viewing Bravetti’s figure through the unseen eyes of her husband from Joyce’s source, tortured by his own awareness of her remembering? But what comes across is simply a sense of amplified voyeurism, which, strangely, is one of the few mechanisms that is no function of memory at all.